Efficacy of Mental Health Interventions on College Students' Help-Seeking Attitudes
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Date
2019-01-01
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Department
Psychology
Program
Human Services
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Access limited to the UMBC community. Item may possibly be obtained via Interlibrary Loan thorugh a local library, pending author/copyright holder's permission.
This item is likely protected under Title 17 of the U.S. Copyright Law. Unless on a Creative Commons license, for uses protected by Copyright Law, contact the copyright holder or the author.
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Abstract
Many college students suffering from mental illness in the United States do not seek appropriate mental health care, even though treatment is known to have positive effects on functioning and wellbeing (Blanco et al., 2008). Mental illness stigma is considered an important barrier to emerging adults' help-seeking. Recent mental health interventions aimed at increasing the use of mental health services have been designed to reduce the stigma associated with help-seeking. Many of these efforts, however, have not focused specifically on interventions for a college campus, nor targeted the interventions for this audience. The current study examined the efficacy, in terms of reducing stigma and influencing help-seeking attitudes and intentions, of a targeted mental health intervention for college students, compared to an existing non-stigma focused mental health intervention. One hundred and twenty-nine college students at University of Maryland, Baltimore County participated in one of two mental health interventions: (1) Targeted Mental Health workshop (TMH): contact video featuring college students speaking about their mental illnesses followed by a facilitated group discussion, (2) Usual Care workshop (UC): information on stress and anxiety as well as campus resources for counseling. Overall, both workshops appeared to improve help-seeking attitudes and intentions (though TMH had a larger effect, partial eta squared = .38, compared to UC, partial eta squared = .11) and decrease social stigma, immediately post-test, although the workshops did not appear to have lasting effects at the follow-up. Results suggest that both the educational approach of the UC workshop and the targeted contact approach of the TMH workshop may be effective in changing immediate attitudes in a college student population.