Informal care has been conceptualized as a vital stress factor, which jointly with its chronic character and the lack of foresight about the time of its finalization, has been associated to the negative repercussions on the physical and psychological wellbeing of the informal caregiver. This situation has been generically denominated with the overall term of caregiver burden. Burden is associated with depression and anxiety as well as with abandonment and mistreatment of the dependent person. Optimal psychosocial interventions to be assumed by European Governments in their long - term care systems are still needed to be developed to fight succesfully against this burden.

The objective is to review the main psychological and social programmes developed to deal with the informal caregivers burden, with the aim to propose the more appropiate programmes to be adopted by the European long-term care systems.

A review of the main theories and results of the existing research to date about the concept of the informal caregiver's burden has been done mainly in policy papers, peer-reviewed journals and research developed by the authors.

The results lead to conclude that the psycho-educational intervention programs framed within the respite services jointly with the knowledge of the determining variables of the burden can comprise the first optimal approach in order to effectively deal with the burden problem of the informal caregivers of dependent senior citizens.