Help-seeking attitude is a person’s overall (i.e., positive versus negative) evaluation of the act of seeking help. It is a learned disposition to judge to the idea of seeking help in a favorable or unfavorable manner.
When studying the behavior of seeking help from a mental health professional, “attitude” is shorthand for “attitude toward seeking help from a mental health professional.” Help-seeking attitude is one of the most frequently studied help-seeking constructs and is incorporated into a number of medical/health/social scientific theories used to studying health services treatment access.
In the IBM-HS and the wider reasoned action tradition, attitude is considered an “essentially unidimensional” (Stout, 1990) construct with both instrumental and experiential evaluative facets, which collectively should be measured with a single attitude score (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010).
We recommend using the singular term “attitude” (as opposed to the plural “attitudes”) to describe this construct, as this emphasizes its essential unidimensional evaluation nature. We also recommend use of terms such as “favorable/unfavorable” and “more/less favorable” to quantify the direction of the attitude construct, and discourage use of terms such as “positive/negative” or “greater/lesser” or “better/worse” that do not carry the same precision or can come across as pathologizing.
People will report a more favorable attitude when they (a) anticipate more positive outcomes of seeking help and fewer negative outcomes and (b) experience more positive emotional reactions to the idea of their seeking help and fewer negative emotional reactions (Hammer et al., 2023). Likewise, people will report a less favorable attitude when the inverse is true. There is empirical support for this association between outcome/experiential beliefs and attitude within (Eisenberg et al., 2012; Hammer et al., 2023; Sirey et al., 2001) and beyond (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010Ch3; Montaño & Kasprzyk, 2015) the mental health help-seeking context. Literature (Hammer et al., 2023; Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010) notes that this association is most accurately detected when outcome beliefs with variable valence (e.g., “receiving a mental health diagnosis”) are appropriately weighted by participants’ outcome evaluation (e.g., “How good or bad would it be if your seeking help [resulted in you receiving a mental health diagnosis]?”).
Help seeking attitude is important to study because meta-analytic evidence suggests that attitude is, in general, the strongest predictor of help seeking intention (Adams et al., 2002; Li, Dorstyn, & Denson, 2014). Researchers have extensively studied the relationship between help seeking attitude and related constructs. Of note, meta-analyses suggest that help seeking attitude are related to acculturation/enculturation (Sun, Hoyt, Brockberg, Lam, & Tiwari, 2016); gender (Nam et al., 2010); conformity to masculine norms (Wong, Moon-Ho, Wang, & Miller, 2017); anticipated benefits and risks of seeking help, self-stigma of seeking help, public stigma of seeking help or of mental illness, self-disclosure, self-concealment, social support, and depression (Nam et al., 2013). In summary, because people’s attitude may (it depends on the population in question) influence their behavior via intention (Armitage & Conner, 2001), professionals may be able to increase help seeking behavior for a given population by implementing prevention and intervention programs that improve people’s help seeking attitude (Gulliver, Griffiths, Christensen, & Brewer, 2012; Hammer & Vogel, 2010).
A description of available mental health help-seeking attitude measures can be found on the Attitude measures page.
(Please note: select page content is excerpted from Hammer et al., 2024.)