Informal systems of care for the chronically mentally ill.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the structure and functioning of informal caregiving systems of community-based chronically mentally ill individuals. From a sample of 409 family member reports, 150 caregiving systems are described in terms of size, composition and division of caregiving labor. Results show that these systems are about as large as those found for elder caregiving systems, that women and relatives predominate as caregivers, that there is considerable diversity in the types of caregivers and that size and composition are related to the division of labor observed in these systems.