Help-seeking mechanisms are incorporated into certain medical/health/social scientific theories used to studying health services treatment access. When studying the behavior of seeking help from a mental health professional, “mechanisms” is shorthand for “mechanisms related to seeking help from a mental health professional.”

According to the IBM-HS, there are multiple help-seeking mechanisms, each of which should be measured with a standardized general (i.e., not narrowly tailored to a particular population) self-report survey measure. To learn more about measurement options for these mechanisms, visit the webpages below:

As noted by Hammer and colleagues (2024): help-seeking mechanisms are assessed with multiple-item direct measures—measures composed of a set of intercorrelated, internally consistent items that have a similar association with antecedents/consequences and can be averaged to create a mean score thought to represent the strength or quantity of a single underlying latent construct (Coltman et al., 2008, p. 1252). Direct measures are analyzed at the mean level because the items are homogenous and interchangeable.