Mental health literacy as a moderator in the relationship of social support and help-seeking attitudes

• Main Author: Bacaoco, Jeemon Rey Amaca
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2019
• Subjects: Mental health; Social networks; Help-seeking behavior; Clinical Psychology
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/7062
• Institution: De La Salle University

Studies have reported that there is a noticeable low help-seeking rate for people who have been diagnosed with mental health disorders (Gulliver, Griffiths, & Christensen, 2010; Schomerus & Angermeyer, 2008), and even for those who were not diagnosed (Tieu & Konnert, 2014; Han & Pong, 2015). Using the Behavioral Model of Health Service Use, this research identified perceived social support and mental health literacy as important variables in explaining professional help-seeking attitudes. Social support was found to have a positive (Tieu & Konnert, 2014; Zalat et al., 2017; Nagai, 2015; Jung et al., 2017; Wu et al., 2011) and negative relationship (Tuliao & Velasquez, 2014; Hom et al., 2015; Taylor, 2018) with professional help-seeking. Thus, mental health literacy was utilized as a moderator to explain the inconsistency in the said relationship. As an enabling factor, mental health literacy was hypothesized to moderate the relationship of social support which is as predisposing factor and professional help-seeking. The results show that social support and mental health literacy are both positively correlated with professional help-seeking attitudes. However, when the interaction effect was examined, mental health literacy did not moderate the relationship of social support and professional help-seeking. A supplementary analysis was utilized, and it showed that high family support, which is one of the dimensions of social support, is being moderated by low mental health literacy to increase professional help-seeking. The current research has helped established the importance of social support and mental health literacy in explaining professional help-seeking.