"Why are you more important than I am?": How much should family caregivers sacrifice?
Additional Videos: We've also posted three short clips from the event. The first addresses the costly effects of altruism among caregivers. The second one focuses on the similarities and differences between caregiving and parenting. And the third video looks at the responsibilities caregivers take on at life's end.
As we age and have increasing health needs, most of us don't want to be moved into a nursing facility but staying at home is hard on the family caregiver. How much should a spouse or adult child sacrifice to become a caregiver? Their health? Their job? Their financial stability? What if the person who needs the care was a bad spouse or parent? And how do different cultures think differently about these questions?
Larissa MacFarquhar, staff writer for The New Yorker, moderates a panel discussion that looks at these issues.
Panelists are:
Leah Eskenazi, MSW is the Director of Operation’s & Planning for Family Caregiver Alliance (FCA) - an organization focused on caregiver services, policy, and research in the SF Bay Area and nationally. Her 30+ year career working with older adults and family/friend caregivers spans direct service and leadership roles in human service nonprofits, healthcare and county government - and engagement with urban, suburban and rural communities. She is regularly quoted in the media, gives frequent presentations with a goal towards promoting the health and well-being of caregivers, and is the author of a series of articles on caregiving published by the PBS Newshour.
Mary Felstiner received her B.A. degree at Harvard, her M.A. at Columbia and her Ph.D. at Stanford. She served for three decades as Professor of History at San Francisco State University, and as short-term Visiting Professor at Stanford, Yale, and UC Santa Cruz. Her publications, including two books, specialize in Latin American history and in the study of genocide, of women, and of disability. After many years as a caregiver, Mary is now working on a sonnet cycle on caregiving.
Dr. Ranak Trivedi is an assistant professor in the Dept. of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, Stanford University and an investigator at the Center for Innovation to Implementation at the VA Palo Alto Health Care System. She received her PhD in clinical psychology with health psychology concentration from Duke University. Her research focuses on engaging groups that have been historically been marginalized, especially patients with mental health conditions and framily members, that is, family members or friends who provide informal care to patients. Her studies have provided insights into how framilies and chronically and seriously patients collaborate around their mutual health, understanding the impact of their interpersonal relationship on chronic illness self-management, and the individual, dyadic, and systems-level barriers that they encounter. She has developed two technology-enabled dyadic self-management programs to address the stress management needs of both patients and their framily. Dr. Trivedi envisions a health care system that is not only patient centered, but framily centered, wherein family members and friends are engaged and empowered in navigating the healthcare system on the patient’s behalf while receiving the supports and services receive that they need.