Help-seeking intentions for early signs of mental illness and their associated factors: comparison across four kinds of health problems

Background: Failure and delay in initial treatment contact for mental disorders has been recognized as an important public health problem. According to the concept of mental health literacy, recognition of symptoms is crucial to making decisions to seek or not seek professional help. The aims of this study were to investigate the types of health problems for which Japanese adults intend to seek help, their preferred sources of help, and the factors associated with help-seeking intentions.

Methods: A cross-sectional web-based survey was conducted in June 2014 among Japanese adults aged 20-59 years. A total of 3308 eligible respondents were included in this study. Help-seeking intentions were measured by listing potential sources of help (including 'would not receive help') and asking which ones would be chosen in four health conditions indicated by irritability, dizziness, insomnia, and depressed mood, respectively.

Results: In the case of dizziness, 85.9% of the participants reported a positive help-seeking intention and 42.7% gave first priority to seeking help from formal sources. These percentages were smaller in the cases of insomnia (75.4 and 25.0%), depressed mood (74.9 and 18.7%), and irritability (72.9 and 0.9%). Multiple logistic regression analysis revealed that the factors significantly associated with help-seeking intentions were almost identical across the four health problems. In particular, perception of family and friends regarding help-seeking, psychiatric history, contact with people with mental illness, better health literacy, and neighborhood communicativeness were significantly associated with the overall help-seeking intention and also the help-seeking intention from formal sources for all the problems of dizziness, insomnia, and depressed mood.

Conclusions: The majority of participants indicated their intentions to seek help, but psychological problems (insomnia and depressed mood) were less likely to induce help-seeking intentions than a physical problem (dizziness). Besides developing health literacy skills, community-based interventions for creating a friendly approachable atmosphere and facilitating daily interactions with family, friends, and neighbors may be worth considering as a possible public health strategy for encouraging help-seeking whether for psychological or physical problems.