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Effects of Care Givers Counselling on Depression among People Living With HIV/AIDs

Introduction: People living with HIV/AIDs (PLWHA) are also prone to mental health problem such as depression. However, there is limited evidence on the effects of care giver counselling on the level of depression among people living with HIV/AIDs. This study aimed to determine factors associated with depression and the effects of care giver counselling and follow up on depression among PLWHA attending Federal Teaching Hospital, Ido-Ekiti, Nigeria. 
Methods: This study has two parts. The first part addressed the descriptive aspect of the study while in the second part, an experimental study was performed on 64 depressed HIV patients (32 intervention group and 32 in the control group). These 64 respondents were randomly screened out of 351 consenting PLWHA in the hospital using Zung’s self-rating depression scale. A systematic random sampling technique was employed to allocate participants to the groups, with the first client of the 64 participants allocated to the control group and the next client allocated to intervention group. On-phone counselling of a minimum of 30 minutes (once in a week) was done for the patients in the experimental group for a month after which a post intervention assessment was done for both intervention and control groups. Bar chart and descriptive statistics were employed to explain the data. Yate’s Chi-squared statistics was employed to find out statistical associations between the groups while the p-values were consequently reported. 
Results: The age of the studied subjects ranged between 21-80 years with a mean age of 41.53 (±9.06). One hundred forty-nine (42.5%) of the 351 subjects were found to have one form of depression or the other. Of 351 subjects, 57.5% were not depressed, 17.1% had mild depression, 10.3% had moderate depression and 15.1% had severe depression. One hundred two (29.1%) of 351 respondents came from a severely dysfunctional family, while 193(55.0%) from a moderately dysfunctional family and 56(16%) from highly functional family. The percentage of the intervention group that suffered severe depression reduced from 40.6% to 6.2% after the intervention as opposed to a marginal reduction of 34.4% to 31.2% in the control group without intervention (p-value<0.001). Also, the relationships between the severity of depression and BMI, CD4 and family functions were significantly associated with p-values of <0.001. 
Conclusion: Care giver counselling significantly reduced depression among PLWHA. Therefore, PLWHA should be encouraged through policies and otherwise to attend counselling sessions with caregivers.