The core problem: help negation
Common sense says that the more distressed people become, the more likely they are to reach out for help. The research says otherwise. Across multiple studies of high school students and young adults, the opposite pattern keeps appearing: as suicidal ideation and hopelessness rise, the intention to seek help falls. This phenomenon — help negation — means the young people at greatest risk are precisely the ones most likely to say they would seek help from "no one." Critically, the research shows help negation is not fully explained by hopelessness or by prior experiences with help: it appears to be part of the suicidal process itself.
The role of emotional competence
A second consistent finding: adolescents who are poor at identifying, describing, and managing their emotions are the least likely to intend to seek help from friends, family, or professionals — even though they are the ones who would benefit most. Skill in dealing with one's own emotions turns out to be a gateway to using social support at all. This work connects the help-seeking research to emotional intelligence, and points to emotional skill-building as a lever for getting help to those who need it.
The General Help-Seeking Questionnaire (GHSQ) — free download
The GHSQ measures intentions to seek help from a range of sources (friends, family, mental health professionals, no one) for personal-emotional problems and suicidal ideation. It is widely used in adolescent mental-health research internationally and is free for research and clinical use.
Please cite: Wilson, C. J., Deane, F. P., Ciarrochi, J., & Rickwood, D. (2005). Measuring help-seeking intentions: Properties of the General Help-Seeking Questionnaire. Canadian Journal of Counselling, 39(1), 15–28.
Key papers (free PDFs and plain-language summaries)
Related work
Maintained by Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). PDFs hosted with permission for scholarly use; please cite the published versions.