DOI: 10.36347/sjams.2018.v06i11.025

Pages: 4290-4296

Psychosocial factors have been implicated in causal theories of psychiatric illness since the inception of psychiatry as an independent medical discipline. It includes the socio-demographic profile of a person and all the life events that leads to a particular repertoire of responses according to the individual psychology of a person. Still we have not come to a conclusion to the cause of psychiatric illness and so the classification of mental disorders is based on group of symptoms. Lately researchers have been grouping all the patients presenting with psychotic symptoms for the first time into a category that they term “first-episode psychosis” (FEP), in a hope to elicit causal factors. This particular paper is an attempt to find clinical distribution of diagnoses in FEP and significant association between the psychosocial factors (socio-demographic factors and life events) and FEP. Study was carried out in the outpatient department of psychiatry at post-graduate institute of behavioural and medical sciences. 104 patients of first-episode psychosis were subjected to socio-demographic and clinical data sheet and presumptive stressful life event scale and were diagnosed using ICD 10 DCR criteria. Data was analyzed using SPSS version 16. Majority of the patients (58.7%) were diagnosed as having schizophrenia, followed by acute and transient psychotic disorder (32.7%). Amongst socio-demographic variables only education was significantly associated with FEP (p<0.05) and amongst stressful life events, events like change in working condition or transfer, trouble at work with colleagues, superiors or subordinates, property or crops damaged, religion conversion and change or expansion of business were significantly associated with FEP (p<0.05). Thus it can be concluded that primary prevention strategies that promote education and that build up coping strategies in an individual can turn out to be effective, though further research is needed to substantiate the conclusion.