UNASSIGNED: Identify factors associated with formal and informal mental health help-seeking intentions among college students reporting suicidal thoughts and behaviors (STBs).
UNASSIGNED: College students with STBs in the 2018-2020 Healthy Minds Study.
UNASSIGNED: Cross-sectional secondary analysis using logistic regressions to determine whether demographic (age, sex, race, religion, and finances) and psychosocial factors (mental health, perceptions about mental health help, and barriers) are associated with (in)formal help-seeking intentions.
UNASSIGNED: Positive significant factors for all help-seeking intentions included being in a romantic relationship, Christian, symptoms of anxiety, or positive beliefs and knowledge about therapy efficacy. Depressive symptoms, Black/African American, psychological inflexibility, low perceived need, and barriers were negatively associated. Informal help-seeking was negatively associated with Hispanic/Latinx and personal stigma toward mental health. Formal help-seeking was positively associated with Asian/Asian American and negatively associated with financial stress.
UNASSIGNED: Unique factors were associated with formal or informal help-seeking intentions in college students with STBs.

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.

BACKGROUND: Medical residents experiencing depression can cause life-threatening harm to themselves and their patients. Treatment is available, but many do not seek help.
METHODS: The current set of three studies investigated whether depressive symptomatology in and of itself served as a help-seeking barrier-and whether expectations of help-seeking benefits provided insight into why this occurred. Nine waves of cross-sectional data were collected from medical residents across several different hospitals in the United States.
RESULTS: There was a large negative association between levels of depressive symptomatology and help-seeking intentions (H1) in Studies 1 and 3. In Study 2, this association was significant for one of the two help-seeking measures. For all analyses, studies, and measures, there was a large negative association between residents\' levels of depressive symptomatology and agreement that seeking help will lead to positive outcomes (H2). Likewise, there was a moderately large indirect effect for all analyses, studies, and measures such that the association between levels of depressive symptomatology and help-seeking intentions occurred through less favorable expectations of help-seeking benefits (H3). Lower agreement of the benefits associated with help-seeking explained between 43 and 65% of depressive symptomatology\'s negative association with help-seeking intentions across studies.
CONCLUSIONS: The current findings indicate that depressive symptomatology itself represents a help-seeking barrier and underscore the importance of help-seeking expectations in explaining why this occurs. If future studies reveal a causal relationship between the perceived benefits of help-seeking and help-seeking intentions, then increasing such expectations could offer a potential path for increasing resident help-seeking.

Psychological distress and suicide rates are climbing in Australia despite substantial mental health programme investment in recent decades. Understanding where individuals prefer to seek support in the event of a personal or emotional crisis may help target mental health resources to where they are most needed. This study aimed to explore individual differences in help-seeking preferences that may be leveraged for early intervention and mental health service design.
Latent profile analysis was used to explore the help-seeking preferences of 1561 Australian online help-seekers who elected to complete a psychological distress screening on a popular mental health website, Beyond Blue.
Four latent profiles of help-seeker emerged that illustrate distinct preference channels for support: help-negaters, professional help-seekers, family help-seekers and help-affirmatives. Help-negaters were the least likely to consider seeking help from any source, recorded the highest levels of psychological distress and suicidal ideation, and were more likely to be younger. Help-affirmatives were the most likely to seek help from any source, particularly from religious leaders, and were more likely to speak a language other than English at home.
Many individuals experiencing mental health concerns will prefer to seek support from family or community contacts rather than professionals, and some will not seek help at all. Diversity in help-seeking preferences should be considered when designing mental health services, outreach and psychoeducation materials.

Despite the high prevalence of mental health disorders, professional help seeking was often unsought, worsening impairments in overall functioning among those who experienced them.
This study aimed to evaluate the online HOPE intervention on help-seeking attitudes and intentions among young adults 18 to 24 years old in a University in Singapore. The study also described the process evaluation of the online HOPE intervention.
The study adopted a parallel two arms RCT. Outcome measurements measured at baseline, post-test and two-month follow-up were (1) recognition of depression, (2) barriers of help-seeking, (3) help-seeking intentions (4) attitudes about interventions, help sources, medications and (5) participants\' perceptions about the intervention.
At post-test, intervention group had significantly lower acknowledgement of depression as stress. At two months, control group was significantly more concerned about side effects of medications. There were no significant differences in all barriers of help-seeking between groups, pre and post intervention. The intervention group had greater acknowledgement of antidepressants, tranquilisers and antipsychotics. Thematic analysis revealed four main themes.
There was high baseline recognition of depression. Improvements in help-seeking intentions were partially attributed to decreased help-seeking barriers.
The online HOPE intervention could be promptly implemented for young adults to enhance the identification of mental health disorders, early help-seeking and recovery. Nurses played an important role in patient education, and online interventions are especially crucial during this Covid period which mandated social distancing. [NCT04266119].

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.