Suicide is a leading cause of death in college-aged youth, yet only half of all college students report engaging in professional mental health help-seeking. We examined how the various aspects of young adults\' suicidality were associated with their openness to pursue professional mental health care in the future (i.e., \"future help-seeking intentions\"). Multilevel binary logistic regressions were tested in a sample of 24,446 U.S. college undergraduates with suicidality. The moderating effect of past service utilization on future help-seeking intentions was also tested. Strikingly, young people reporting past-year suicidal ideation, past-year suicidal attempts, and self-reported likelihood of a future suicide attempt demonstrated decreased likelihood of future help-seeking intentions, while those reporting prior diagnosis of a mental health condition and/or past service utilization demonstrated an increased likelihood. Past service utilization also significantly moderated the effect of suicide disclosure, such that youth reporting prior disclosure and prior professional treatment-seeking demonstrated greater odds of future help-seeking intentions relative to those who had disclosed suicidality but never utilized professional services. In order to mitigate the mental health crisis facing youth, further exploration is necessary to understand why students with suicidality do not report openness to seek help. It is also imperative to develop and implement novel strategies to identify at-risk students, understand and alleviate relevant barriers to treatment, and promote positive help-seeking attitudes and behaviors.

As a persistent public health problem affecting thousands of adolescents every year, teen dating violence has been studied extensively. However, gaps remain in the knowledge on what adolescents think about seeking help for violence in a dating relationship and how these attitudes might change over time. This study adopts a longitudinal person-oriented approach to explore configurations of help-seeking preferences in a sample of rural adolescents (N at wave 1 = 580, Mage = 13 years, SD = 1.48; 52.7% female; 46.6% African American, 39.4% White, 14% Hispanic and other minorities), surveyed annually for four years, with each assessment approximately 12 months apart. Latent class analyses uncovered variation in adolescents\' willingness to disclose dating violence, captured by six groups: (a) Multi-help-seekers (19%), (b) Reluctant help-seekers (15%), (c) Selective help-seekers (16%), (d) Parent confidants (11%), (e) Friends confidants (22%), and (f) Moderate help-seekers (17%). Follow-up analyses revealed that select sociodemographic characteristics (age, gender, and family income) were unevenly distributed among the identified groups, pointing to the need to account for individual and contextual influences in understanding heterogeneity in help-seeking attitudes. Latent transition models further showed that although individual membership in latent classes was generally stable between middle and high school, transitions between help-seeking classes were common as well. The article concludes by discussing these findings in the context of further research and programming to promote help-seeking among developing adolescents, including targeted strategies to address the needs of adolescents who think differently about disclosing dating abuse.

When dealing with the mental health concerns of college students, access to professional mental health services is necessary to enable early identification and prevention of severe mental health issues. Accordingly, this study used the theory of planned behavior (TPB) as a theoretical framework to determine the predictors of help-seeking intentions among college students in Korea. The authors developed a TPB questionnaire to measure attitudes, subjective norms, behavioral control, and intentions for seeking help and subsequently validated it via the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). The authors considered mental health condition as a pre-existing factor that influences TPB variables. In addition, they deemed knowledge of professional mental health services as a factor influencing perceived behavioral control regarding help-seeking behavior among Korean college students. The research hypotheses were stated as follows: (H1) mental health conditions would influence TPB variables, which would in turn influence their intentions to seek help, and (H2) knowledge about professional mental health services would influence perceived behavioral control. With 300 undergraduate and graduate students, our results confirmed that mental health condition and knowledge about professional mental health services were associated with TPB variables, and all of the TPB variables we examined predicted intention to seek help.

BACKGROUND: Immigrants are more likely than the majority population to have unmet needs for public mental health services. This study aims to understand potential ethnic differences in preferred help-seeking sources for depression in Norway, and how such preferences relate to acculturation orientation.
METHODS: A convenience sample of immigrants from Russia (n = 164), Poland (n = 127), Pakistan (n = 128), and Somalia (n = 114), and Norwegian students (n = 250) completed a survey. The sample was recruited from social media platforms, emails, and direct contact. The survey consisted of a vignette describing a moderately depressed person. Respondents were asked to provide advice to the person by completing a modified version of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire. The immigrant sample also responded to questions about acculturation orientation using the Vancouver Index of Acculturation Scale.
RESULTS: Significant differences were found in the endorsement of traditional (e.g., religious leader), informal (e.g., family), and semiformal (e.g., internet forum) help-sources between immigrant groups, and between immigrant groups and the Norwegian respondent group. Immigrants from Pakistan and Somalia endorsed traditional help sources to a greater extent than immigrants from Russia and Poland, and the Norwegian student sample. There were no ethnic differences in endorsement of formal mental help sources (e.g., a medical doctor). Maintenance of the culture of origin as the acculturation orientation was associated with preferences for traditional and informal help sources, while the adoption of mainstream culture was associated with semiformal and formal help-seeking sources.
CONCLUSIONS: Ethnic differences in help-seeking sources need to be considered when designing and implementing mental health services.

The current study examined accuracy in estimating campus norms for eating disorder (ED) pathology and the impact of normative feedback on intentions to help friends. Participants: The sample included 130 undergraduate women. Method: Participants estimated prevalence of ED pathology and were randomly assigned to normative feedback or a control condition. Vignettes were presented describing bulimic and sleep disorder symptoms. After presentation of each vignette, participants reported sympathy for and intentions to help friends with similar symptoms. Results: Nine ED pathology estimates were significantly higher than comparison values documented in a larger survey of women attending their university in the previous year. Those who received normative feedback reported lower intentions to help and lower sympathy for a student with bulimic symptoms compared to sleep disorder symptoms. Conclusion: Results raise the possibility that normative feedback could reduce support for friends with bulimic symptoms.

Mental health services are underutilised by people who could benefit from treatment. Research into help-seeking intentions (HSI) is required to support interventions to increase service use. Existing HSI measures are not psychometrically robust and problems with content validity undermine research in this field. Our purpose was to create a clear conceptualization of HSI and systematically review the content of existing measures. Previous researchers had defined help-seeking and intentions separately, so the first step was to create a more comprehensive definition. Seven theoretical perspectives identified in the HSI literature were mapped onto the new definition and aggregated to form a conceptual framework that reflects expert opinion. This framework guided an analysis of item relevance and a comparison of completeness across measures. Most individual items (99.1%) were relevant, lending credibility to the proposed framework. However, no measure provided a complete assessment of the HSI construct. This study used a novel methodology to develop a definition and conceptual framework, both of which reflect sound theoretical perspectives and represent the consensus-view of experts. The current results will guide the development of stronger measures with improved construct validity and will support interventions aimed at improving help-seeking.

To identify factors that may increase intentions to seek help for an early dementia diagnosis. Early dementia diagnosis in Ireland is low, reducing the opportunity for intervention, which can delay progression, reduce psychological distress and increase social supports.
Using the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), and a mixed methods approach, three focus groups were conducted (N = 22) to illicit attitudes and beliefs about help seeking for an early dementia diagnosis. The findings informed the development of the Help Seeking Intentions for Early Dementia Diagnosis (HSIEDD) questionnaire which was piloted and then administered to a sample of community dwelling adults from Dublin and Kildare (N = 95).
Content analysis revealed participants held knowledge of the symptoms of dementia but not about available interventions. Facilitators of help seeking were family, friends and peers alongside well informed health professionals. Barriers to seeking help were a lack of knowledge, fear, loss, stigma and inaccessible services. The quantitative findings suggest the TPB constructs account for almost 28% of the variance in intentions to seek help for an early diagnosis of dementia, after controlling for sociodemographic variables and knowledge of dementia. In the final step of the regression analysis, the main predictors of help seeking were knowledge of dementia and subjective norm, accounting for 6% and 8% of the variance, respectively.
Future interventions should aim to increase awareness of the support available to those experiencing early memory problems, and should highlight the supportive role that family, friends, peers and health professionals could provide.