Abstract:
Severe mental illnesses are strongly associated with impaired quality of life. They are reported to
have poorer quality of life than both the general population and otherwise healthy persons with
chronic diseases. However, due attention was not given to the quality of life of people with a
severe mental illness other than focusing on symptom reduction. This study aims to assess the
quality of life and associated factors among patients with severe mental illness at the University
of Gondar Specialized Hospital psychiatric clinic outpatient unit. A cross-sectional study was
conducted. A systematic random sampling technique was used to get a total number of 334
samples. Quality of life was measured by WHOQOL-BREF. Other tools utilized were used like;
Oslo social support scale, Morisky medication adherence scale, Jacoby perceived stigma scale,
and Pittsburgh sleep quality. The data were entered into Epi Info version 4 and analyzed using
STATA version 14. Mean, Standard deviation and Simple and multiple linear regression with
95% confidence interval were used for interpretation. A total of 320 respondents participated in
this study out of the 334 sample size which makes a 95.8% response rate. The results indicated
that the mean (± SD) score of the WHOQOL-BREF scale in this study was 49.16 (±15.64).
Patients with severe mental illness had a low mean score on all domains of the WHOQOL-BREF
scale. On physical, psychological, social, and environmental health domains quality of life was
found 47.96 (±17.81), 54.12 (±14.40), 45.79 (±19.37), and 47.79 (±16.83) respectively. Social
support, medication non-adherence, and living arrangement were found to be statistically
significantly associated. In conclusion quality of life among patients with severe mental illness
was low. In patients with severe mental illness, priority interventions to improve quality of life
have great importance.
