Help-seeking determinants 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, “determinants” is shorthand for “determinants related to seeking help from a mental health professional.”

According to the IBM-HS, there are seven named categories of help-seeking determinants, as well as a catch-all category entitled “Other determinants” to account for other miscellaneous determinants. To learn more about measurement options for these categories, visit the webpages below, which are being regularly updated and expanded:

As noted by Hammer and colleagues (2024):: Some determinants might be appropriate to measure with self-report measures, whereas others might rely on using proxy questions (e.g., county of residence) to integrate third-party data (e.g., mental health provider density by county) at the case level. Users should seek to incorporate the determinants that are most salient for their population of interest.