Reflections about the attention to family caregivers of people with dementia and proposal of an interdisciplinary psychoeducational intervention

The central role of family caregivers in the care of elderly adults with dementia, as well as their needs and demands, are being progressively recognized by public institutions, as can be seen in the recent passing in Spain of the Law for the Promotion of Personal Autonomy and the Support of Dependent Persons. Although this law represents a significant step towards the development of an optimum model for social attention to caregiving families, it has not been put into effect so its ambiguity and vagueness is still unresolved. Future developments of the Law should be more clearly opened and permeable to the advances in the research field. In recent years, there have been significant advances in the development of interventions for dementia caregivers, and psychoeducational, psychotherapy, and multi-component interventions have been identified as evidence-based psychological treatments for reducing distress. There are still many questions related to the mechanisms of action through which an intervention can be optimized that remain unresolved, some of which are reviewed in this work. Finally, a multicomponent and interdisciplinary psychoeducational intervention for dementia family caregivers is described, in which cognitive-behavioral (CBT) and occupational therapy strategies are used in order to reduce caregivers´ negative psychological and physical distress.