In plain language
Most people who experience serious psychological distress never seek professional help. This study asked whether basic emotional skills — being able to perceive emotions, manage your own emotions, and manage other people's emotions — shape who is willing to reach out for help. One intuitive idea is that emotionally skilled people would be less willing to seek help because they can handle problems on their own. The authors predicted the opposite: that emotional competence would go hand-in-hand with greater willingness to seek help.
Three hundred university undergraduates completed measures of emotional competence, hopelessness, and willingness to seek help from friends, family, doctors, helplines, and mental health professionals for emotional problems and for suicidal thoughts. The prediction was confirmed: people who felt less skilled at managing emotions were less willing to seek help from family and friends for both kinds of problems, and less willing to approach health professionals about suicidal thoughts. These links held even after accounting for hopelessness, sex, and past help-seeking experience.
A mediation analysis suggested why: people poor at managing others' emotions had found their past visits to mental health professionals less useful, and those poorer experiences explained their reluctance to return. The troubling upshot is that the people most at risk of depression, hopelessness, and suicidality — those with weak emotion-management skills — are the least willing to seek help, and the least likely to benefit when they do. The authors argue that counsellors should identify such clients and consider training them in emotion-management skills as part of treatment and prevention programs.
Key findings
- In a survey of 300 university undergraduates, people who reported being poorer at managing their own and others' emotions were less willing to seek help from family and friends for both emotional problems and suicidal ideation.
- Lower emotion-management skill also predicted less willingness to seek help from health professionals for suicidal ideation; emotion perception skill showed no relationship to help-seeking of any kind.
- These relationships held after controlling for hopelessness, sex, and prior help-seeking experience, ruling out several alternative explanations.
- Mediational analysis showed that the perceived usefulness of past help-seeking experience fully accounted for the link between managing others' emotions and willingness to seek professional help — poorer past experiences explained the reluctance.
- People low in emotion management who did seek professional help rated that help as less useful, meaning those who most need help are both least likely to seek it and least likely to benefit from it.
- The authors recommend that counsellors identify clients with poor emotion-management skills and consider emotional competence training as a supplement to treatment and in youth prevention programs.
How to cite
APA
Ciarrochi, J. V., & Deane, F. P. (2001). Emotional competence and willingness to seek help from professional and nonprofessional sources. British Journal of Guidance & Counselling, 29(2), 233–246. https://doi.org/10.1080/03069880124843
BibTeX
@article{ciarrochi2001emotional,
author = {Ciarrochi, Joseph V. and Deane, Frank P.},
title = {Emotional competence and willingness to seek help from professional and nonprofessional sources},
journal = {British Journal of Guidance \& Counselling},
year = {2001},
volume = {29},
number = {2},
pages = {233--246},
doi = {10.1080/03069880124843}
}
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.