In plain language
Most young people who are struggling emotionally — even those thinking about suicide — never see a mental health professional. This study set out to identify and prioritize the specific beliefs and fears that stop adolescents from seeking professional help, and to test whether hopelessness and bad experiences with past professional help explain why barriers translate into avoidance.
Six hundred and eight high school students from New South Wales and Queensland (aged 12–21, grades 8–12) completed questionnaires measuring barriers to help-seeking, intentions to seek professional help for personal-emotional problems and suicidal thoughts, the quality of any prior professional help, and hopelessness.
The single biggest barrier was the belief that one should solve one's own problems — the desire for autonomy — followed by embarrassment, fear of not being understood by adults, and time and money constraints. Every barrier was associated with lower intentions to seek professional help, for both suicidal and non-suicidal problems. Importantly, the perceived quality of prior professional help accounted for the link between barriers and intentions, suggesting that a bad first experience with services can echo through a young person's future willingness to get help. The authors recommend that suicide prevention programs reframe help-seeking as part of independence, impart hope that professional help actually works, and directly address negative beliefs left over from earlier helping experiences.
Key findings
- Among 608 high school students, the strongest barriers to seeking professional help were autonomy beliefs: “I would solve my problem myself” (M = 4.30) and “I think I should work out my own problems” (M = 4.03).
- Other prominent barriers included embarrassment about seeing a counsellor, believing adults cannot understand adolescent problems, and anticipated time and money constraints.
- Higher barriers were consistently related to lower intentions to seek professional psychological and medical help, for both suicidal and non-suicidal problems.
- Greater hopelessness and poorer-quality prior professional help were both associated with higher help-seeking barriers.
- Once the quality of prior professional help was statistically controlled, barriers no longer predicted help-seeking intentions — past experience with services largely explained the barrier-intention link.
- Barriers and prior-help quality explained at most 24% of the variance in help-seeking intentions, indicating other unmeasured factors also keep adolescents from seeking help.
How to cite
APA
Wilson, C. J., Rickwood, D., Ciarrochi, J., & Deane, F. P. (2002). Adolescent barriers to seeking professional psychological help for personal-emotional and suicidal problems. In Published proceedings of the 9th annual national conference of Suicide Prevention Australia Inc. (pp. 1–8). Sydney, Australia.
BibTeX
@incollection{wilson2002adolescent,
author = {Wilson, Coralie J. and Rickwood, Debra and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Deane, Frank P.},
title = {Adolescent barriers to seeking professional psychological help for personal-emotional and suicidal problems},
booktitle = {Published Proceedings of the 9th Annual National Conference of Suicide Prevention Australia Inc.},
year = {2002},
pages = {1--8},
address = {Sydney, Australia}
}
Related work
- All publications by Joseph Ciarrochi (searchable, with free PDFs)
- Process-Based Therapy & Idionomic Analysis
Author: Joseph Ciarrochi (ORCID 0000-0003-0471-8100). Free copy hosted with permission for scholarly use. Please cite the published version.