(from the journal abstract) Caring for a family member with Alzheimer's disease or other types of dementia has significant physical, psychological and social consequences for the caregiver. Negative aspects of care giving experience were clearly documented, as caregiver depression, perceived poor health and increased risk of morbidity. The caregiver burden depends on patient's variables, such as behavioural problems, but is mainly associated with caregivers' variables such as sex (women report a higher level of burden than male carers), lack of information, satisfaction of social support and quality of the past relationship between the carer and the patient. Recent studies attempted to identify positive aspects of care giving and examined how they are associated with caregiver outcomes. Sense of duty, meaning of care giving, companionship, rewarding are associated with lower burden scores. Several studies showed that patients living with highly distressed caregivers exhibit higher frequencies of behavioural problems compared to those living with less distressed caregivers. A knowledge of basic issues in dementia care giving, including predictors and determinants of burden, caregivers' resources, coping strategies and subjective experience, is necessary in order to provide efficient support to the families. Most of proposed interventions aim at alleviating the caregiver's distress, by improving information, social support and coping strategies. Family interventions should assess and define the family's difficulties and focus on their defence mechanism, relieve the members from guilt and favour expression of emotions and communication between the patient and the family. The present article offers a critical overview of the literature in this field and comments on new proposals of family support, with special reference to the concepts of crisis and rehabilitation in psychiatry. We propose to focus family interventions on the process of burden itself, and more precisely on the caregiver's subjective experience, taking the context of crisis periods or rehabilitative times into account. Crisis interventions transform periods of disorganisation lived by the family into opportunity for change, and psychosocial rehabilitation interventions offered by professional caring networks allow continuous assessment and advice to the family. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2005 APA, all rights reserved)