Mental Illness Stigma Effects On College Students With Mental Illness Help-seeking Behavior

Mental illness is preventable and treatable. Professional help in time is an important aspect of mental illness intervention; the psychological intervention cannot take effect without the behavior of help-seeking. Lack of initiative help-seeking of patients with mental illness, mental illness interventions have been seriously affected. Previous research suggests that the stigma of mental illness may be an important reason which affects the help-seeking behavior. The aim of this research is to understand the status of help-seeking behavior, the public mental illness stigma, and self-stigma of mental illness and their internal relations with the help-seeking behavior. In this study,mental illness stigma includes the public stigma of mental illness and self-stigma of mental illness. The public stigma of mental illness includes the opinions on mental illness stigma of the public, stigma mood of the public on the psychiatric patient, social distance of psychiatric patient and community attitude of mental illness. The self-stigma of mental illness includes the stereotype awareness on the illness, stereotype agreement of the mental illness, self-concurrence of the stereotype awareness, and the self-esteem decrement of the patient. The help-seeking behavior contains professional help-seeking and non-professional help-seeking.Our research takes the freshmen with psychological problem of a university as example. The influence of stigma of mental illness on the help-seeking behavior is studied by tracking research methods. First of all, the students with psychological problems are screened out through the assessment of mental health status of the freshmen in the university. And then measuring of mental illness stigma level by interview assessment is processed in order to know the situation of the public stigma of mental illness. And the level of self-stigma of mental illness is measured by interview assessment two months later after the first interview assessment. The behavior of psychological help and the frequency of help-seeking are recorded. The influence of the public stigma of mental illness and self-stigma of mental illness on the behavior of seeking psychological help of the freshmen with psychological problem is studied by using structural equation modeling.First research, the differences of help-seeking behavior of the students with and without psychological problems. The results show that:(1) There are differences between the help-seeking behavior and non-professional help-seeking behavior for the students with and without psychological problems. The level of the professional help-seekingbehavior of the students with psychological problems is higher than the students without psychological problems. And the level of the non-professional help-seeking behavior is lower.(2) There are significant differences on problem perception and self-efficacy of students with and without psychological problems. The level of the problem perception of the students with psychological problems is higher than those without psychological problems, however, the level of self-efficacy is lower than those without psychological problems.(3) The influence of the problem perception and self-efficacy on psychological help-seeking behavior is different, i.e., the level of the problem perception can raise the level of professional help-seeking behavior, but does not affect the level of non-professional help-seeking behavior. The enhancement of self-efficacy will reduce the level of non-professional help-seeking behavior, but does not affect the level of professional help-seeking behavior.Second research, the study of the status of stigma of the students with psychological problems. It is shown that:(1) It is apparently that the college students with psychological problems generally have the public stigma and self-stigma on mental illness.(2) There is a certain mood of stigma to the patients with mental illness of the students with psychological problems, and the mood of mercy is the primary emotional response.(3)The requirements of the social distance to the patients with mental illness of the students with psychological problems are significantly.Third research, the relations between public stigma, self-stigma on mental illness and help seeking behavior of the students with psychological problem. It is shown that:(1)Opinions on mental illness stigma have impacts on psychological help seeking behavior of the students with psychological problem. From the aspect of the professional psychological help, the more agreement on the common of the mental illness, the larger the possibilities of the behavior of seeking professional psychological help of the students is. From the aspect of the non-professional psychological help, the more agreement on the mental illness makes a person feel, the more preferred of the non-professional psychological help of the students is.(2) Stigma mood on psychiatric patient have an impact on psychological help seeking behavior of students with psychological problem.On professional help-seeking behavior, the mood of anger of psychiatric patient can negatively predict professional help seeking behavior; for non-professional help-seeking behavior, mood of mercy can positively predict the behavior of non-professional help.(3)The social distance of stigma of mental illness has no obvious influence on the help-seeking behavior.(4)The community attitudes of stigma of mental illness have nodirectly an impact on the psychological help seeking behavior, however, intermedial roleof self-stigma have an impact on the psychological help seeking behavior of the students.(5) Community attitudes have a positive impact on self-stigma for patients with mental illness, which leading to the negative effects on professional help-seeking behavior of the self-stigma, i.e., the more negative the community attitudes towards mental illness is, the higher the level of self-stigma is, and the higher the level of stigma is, the lower the level of professional help seeking behavior is.We proposed the following methods on the intervention of the stigma of students based on the conclusions mentioned above: first, strengthen the psychological health education in order to decrease the stigma of mental illness. Second, strengthen mental health knowledge propaganda in order to improve college students’ mental health literacy.Third, strengthen the mental health services in the university in order to increase the behavior of seeking professional help of the students with psychological problems.