Caregiver (or carer in Australia, New Zealand, Great Britain), literally "the one who takes care", is the term used to define the family member who, free of charge, and one can add, full-time, assists a own relative who is not self-sufficient in every aspect of daily life, for health reasons, disability or advanced age.
A term, just a term, which however encompasses an entire world, indeed a universe, of emotions, sensations, but above all of anxiety, pain and fear. Because this is what afflicts those who are so elegantly called. Wrongly equated to the figure of the carer, the caregiver actually occupies an absolutely inferior position. In fact, the former, despite not having specific training, since they are not always qualified nurses, however often in possession of the certificate of a training course, takes care of a non self-sufficient person, for a fee, thus finding herself by now covering an active and concrete role in the life of our communities, through a recognized and protected profession. Which unfortunately does not happen with caregivers. Taking care of a full-time relative suffering from disability, senile dementia or a serious illness does not enjoy the same respect and attention as the previous figure. Often even, the family assistant has to keep the fact to himself, almost "ashamed" of the life that he has to give so that someone else can continue, not to live but to survive. Love and continuous and constant assistance thus become a source of pain and despair, often accompanied by loneliness as the only company. If the families in which there is a disabled person or a seriously ill person are already isolated, since suffering, even to the eye, is not grateful to anyone, and is often a source of risk, as well as requests for help from which it becomes difficult to escape, not out of friendship, but out of mere civic sense, the caregiver finds himself doubly abandoned and isolated.
A demanding, hard and tiring task, that undertaken by a family member who voluntarily, or as happens, unfortunately in too many cases, not by his own will, undertakes to offer his help to a sick person, often deprived of any possibility of physical recovery or healing. Commitment, too frequently, therefore, not taken following a personal decision, but due to the events and needs of the family unit to which they belong. Full-time care of a disabled or dementia patient is a task that in the majority of cases, in our society, falls on women, in fact they are 74% of caregivers, and the data regarding age groups are extremely symptomatic. There are 31% of women under the age of 45 who dedicate themselves to this ''gift of themselves out of love'', 38% of those between 46 and 60, 18% between 61 and 70 and even 13% women who still hold this role after the age of 70. Alarming data, which indicate not one but two problems of our historical moment: the abandonment by society of people with disabilities and serious illnesses and the cancellation of a part of the female population, reduced to marginalization, isolation first and then social exclusion and poverty. The non-recognition of the figure of the caregiver, combined with the fact that this role is mainly covered by women, exposes the latter to a very high series of risks, depriving them not only of the possibility of working and of having, once they have reached age at which one should be cared for, a sufficient pension, but even being without income, since often the only source of livelihood for the caregiver is constituted by the sick person to whom he/she assists. Not one, but two groups of people totally forgotten, excluded, because at the sight, it becomes too difficult to bear the disease, the disability and the effects that this causes on those who have to experience the sad aura out of love, devotion or duty.

Abroad this situation has long since passed, this figure enjoys recognition, remembering that the family assistant is still a person, not an automaton devoid of soul and will, but endowed with an identity and a destiny of its own, released, and not chained to that of his client, while the help is not expressed only with good words or with sentences of circumstance, but with concrete aids, which lighten the work of the family member, to whom the dignity of a human person is restored and the possibility of hoping, for himself in a future, that it is not as black as that of his unfortunate relative. Unfortunately, in our country, such good fortune is still far from materializing in reality, as it is known to be our culture, to consider the family as the first and most complete source of welfare, on which all suffering, of any kind, tends to fall, with consequences often, without remedy. Love and affection are often not enough, just as even good will may not be enough, especially since human forces are not infinite, and tend to collide, on the contrary, with a person in need every second of his existence of a quantity of this almost unlimited energy, as well as that love that never fails, until reaching, not so rarely, the terrible and tragic ending, which leads to some extreme gesture for which there will be no possibility of second thoughts.