We have used a qualitative content analysis technique to
understand the core themes/categories. But we did not go
beyond the content analysis to establish the relationships
between the categories. For example, ‘carers’ faith-healing
practices’ are mainly due to the result of their ‘explanatory
model of illness’. To make it clear, the carers who strongly
held the belief that God gave this illness to their son/
daughter or those who believed that their son/daughter
have evil spirits in their body were often sought faithhealing
or religious treatment for mental illness. However,
we did not attempt to establish any cause and effect relationship
between categories but rather we put them under
individual heading to highlight the specific issues. Also, the
carers included in this study may not be representative of
the overall population of carers of patients with FEP.