(PS7-B32) Medical Professionals’ Attitudes Toward Mental Health Care Utilization: The Impacts of Stigma and Cognitive Fusion

Medical professionals commonly report–often in conjunction with workplace stressors–emotional exhaustion, low work satisfaction, social/family strain, and increased risk of developing affective disorders, as well as physiological fatigue, medical judgment errors, and employee turnover. In recent years, interventions for medical professionals were developed to address workplace distress and facilitate resilience. However, it is unclear how effective such interventions are at reaching a large number of medical professionals who may be apprehensive about seeking professional care, particularly mental health care. Existing research indicates some medical professionals in need of mental health care may be unwilling or unable to access care due to stigma, inflexible thinking styles, and practical barriers. The current study investigated the associations between stigma, inflexible thinking, and willingness to access care among a diverse sample of medical professionals (N = 274) via online survey. Vignette measures used to assess mental health care seeking attitudes were created by the first author and previously validated in a pilot study. Results indicated mental health care seeking attitudes were negatively correlated with stigma beliefs (self-stigma, r = -.49, p < .01; public stigma, r = -.39, p < .01) and cognitive fusion (r = -.19, p < .01). Further, moderation analyses evaluated if greater cognitive fusion strengthened the relationship between self-stigma and mental health care seeking attitude. The overall model was significant (R² = .25, F(3, 256) = 27.84, p < .001) with self-stigma, cognitive fusion, and the interaction between self-stigma and cognitive fusion explaining 25% of the variance of mental health care seeking attitude. However, the only significant predictor was self-stigma (LLCI = -1.21; ULCI = -0.31, p</em>< .001), showing cognitive fusion was not a significant moderator. Exploratory analyses yielded support for an alternative model where the linkage between cognitive fusion and attitudes toward seeking care for mental health issues is explained or mediated by the presence of self-stigmatizing attitudes, which was maintained when subjected to bootstrapping. Overall, marked associations were found between greater stigma beliefs, greater cognitive fusion, and less favorable attitudes toward mental health care utilization among medical professionals. However, cognitive fusion–considered a component of psychological inflexibility–did not moderate the relationship between stigma beliefs and care seeking attitudes. Instead, stigma beliefs were the greatest predictor of mental health care utilization in the current sample. Given the support in the literature for psychological flexibility being inversely related to stigmatization, these findings bring to light questions about how we assess psychological inflexibility and the impact of stigma on medical professionals’ well-being.