In plain language
When teenagers are struggling — even with thoughts of suicide — who do they turn to? Very few distressed young people seek professional psychological help, and this study set out to map exactly where adolescents say they would go for help, and whether those stated intentions match what they actually do.
The researchers surveyed two contrasting Australian high school populations: 264 students from a public high school in the Illawarra region and over 300 students from a private Christian high school in Queensland. Students rated how likely they would be to seek help from eleven sources — from friends, parents, and other relatives to mental health professionals, GPs, telephone help-lines, teachers, religious leaders, and no-one at all — separately for personal-emotional problems and for suicidal thoughts. They also reported whether they had actually sought help from each source in the previous three weeks.
In both schools, friends were the most preferred source of help, and informal help (friends and family) was clearly preferred over any professional source. Worryingly, many students said they would turn to no-one, especially for suicidal thoughts. Critically, students’ intentions matched their actual recent behavior, which means that measuring and changing help-seeking intentions is a realistic target for suicide prevention programs that aim to connect distressed young people with appropriate help.
Key findings
- Students in both the public and private school samples rated friends as the most likely source of help, significantly higher than any other source, for both personal-emotional and suicidal problems.
- Preferred help sources depended on the type of problem: for suicidal thoughts (versus everyday emotional problems), students were less likely to turn to friends, parents, and relatives, but somewhat more likely to consider mental health professionals and telephone help-lines.
- Seeking help from no-one was a common preference: for suicidal thoughts, students were most likely to turn to friends, and then to no-one, ahead of any professional source.
- Intentions to seek help from each source correlated significantly with actually having sought help from that source in the previous three weeks (r = .14 to .47), showing that intentions track real behavior.
- Students at the Christian school reported higher intentions to seek help from religious leaders and youth workers, while public school students reported higher intentions to use help-lines and GPs for emotional problems; despite these differences, the overall pattern of preferences was consistent across both samples.
- The authors conclude that suicide prevention should target young people’s help-seeking intentions and attitudes, and strengthen relationships between young people and potential help providers.
How to cite
APA
Wilson, C. J., Ciarrochi, J., Rickwood, D., & Deane, F. P. (2002). Help-seeking patterns for suicidal and non-suicidal problems in two high school samples. In Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of Suicide Prevention Australia (pp. 1-7). Sydney, Australia.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{wilson2002help,
author = {Wilson, Coralie J. and Ciarrochi, Joseph and Rickwood, Debra and Deane, Frank P.},
title = {Help-Seeking Patterns for Suicidal and Non-Suicidal Problems in Two High School Samples},
booktitle = {Proceedings of the 9th Annual Conference of Suicide Prevention Australia},
year = {2002},
pages = {1--7},
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.