In plain language
You might expect that people who struggle most with their emotions would be the most eager to get help with them. Earlier research with university students suggested the opposite: those least skilled at managing emotions had the lowest intentions to seek help. This study tested whether the same counterintuitive pattern holds in adolescents, using a broader set of emotional skills, and asked whether the quality of a teen's social support explains the link.
A total of 137 adolescents aged 16 to 18 completed an anonymous survey measuring social support, a range of emotional competencies (identifying and describing emotions, awareness of emotional complexity, and managing their own and others' emotions), hopelessness, and their intentions to seek help from ten different sources, from friends, parents, and teachers to mental health professionals, doctors, and phone help lines, for both personal-emotional problems and suicidal thoughts.
Adolescents low in emotional competence were the least likely to intend to seek help from the people around them, friends, parents, family, and teachers, and had the highest intention of refusing help from everyone. Notably, low emotional competence was unrelated to intentions to seek professional help, and the effects held even after controlling for hopelessness. Social support only partially explained the findings: even teens with high-quality support were unlikely to use it if their emotional skills were low. The results suggest that the adolescents most in need of support face an extra barrier, being unable to identify, describe, and manage the very feelings they would need to communicate, so schools and services may need to build emotional skills rather than wait for troubled teens to reach out.
Key findings
- Adolescents low in emotional awareness and poor at identifying, describing, and managing emotions were the least likely to intend to seek help from nonprofessional sources such as friends, parents, other family members, and teachers.
- Low emotional competence was associated with the highest intention of refusing help from everyone, whereas it was not related to intentions to seek help from professional sources such as mental health professionals or doctors.
- All significant relationships between emotional competence and help-seeking were positive and remained after controlling for hopelessness.
- Social support only partially explained the results: adolescents with high-quality support were still less likely to use it if they were low in emotional competence.
- Teens preferred informal sources: for emotional problems they were most willing to turn to a boyfriend/girlfriend, friend, or parent, and they were more willing to use a phone help line for suicidal thoughts than for other problems.
- Among the 29% who had previously seen a mental health professional, finding that visit useful was strongly related to willingness to see one again (r = .55).
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J., Deane, F. P., Wilson, C. J., & Rickwood, D. (2002). Adolescents who need help the most are the least likely to seek it: The relationship between low emotional competence and low intention to seek help. British Journal of Guidance and Counselling, 30(2), 173–188. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069880220128047
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi2002adolescents,
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph and Deane, Frank P. and Wilson, Coralie J. and Rickwood, Debra},
title = {Adolescents who need help the most are the least likely to seek it: The relationship between low emotional competence and low intention to seek help},
journal = {British Journal of Guidance and Counselling},
year = {2002},
volume = {30},
number = {2},
pages = {173--188},
doi = {10.1080/03069880220128047}
}
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 via the DOI above.