Latinos’ Mental Health Help-Seeking Preferences

Overview: Despite mental health disorders being a leading cause of disability among Latinos, treatment seeking behaviors are very low. Latinos are confronted with significant disparities in mental health treatment. This presentation reports practical research findings that examined attitudes towards and participant characteristics associated with Latino help-seeking for mental health conditions.Proposal text: Despite mental health disorders being a leading cause of disability among Latinos, treatment seeking behaviors are very low. For Latinos, the lifetime prevalence of mental health disorders (38.8%). However, Latino adults are confronted with significant disparities in mental health treatment, particularly for severe mental illness, compared to non-Latino Whites. Only 8.8% of Latino adults received mental health services. Even starker is that among adults diagnosed with serious mental health disorder, Latinos are far less likely than non-Hispanic Whites to seek, receive or complete mental health treatment. Among Latinos with severe mental health issues, nearly 50% go without receiving treatment. Latinos are confronted with significant disparities in mental health treatment. Seeking help for a mental health condition is a precursor to accessing and engaging in mental health treatment. Latinos are consistently less likely than non-Hispanic Whites to seek help for mental health concerns. Understanding help-seeking attitudes and behaviors is a necessary component for addressing unmet mental health needs, as help-seeking attitudes are directly related to future service utilization. This presentation disseminates practical findings from a research study that examines attitudes towards and participant characteristics associated with help-seeking for mental health related conditions among Latinos. Employing a cross-sectional sampling strategy, 469 participants were recruited for a community-based survey study in a large southwestern urban area measuring mental health stigma and help-seeking attitudes. Structural equation modeling was used to estimate the associations between Latinos’ help-seeking attitudes and sociodemographic characteristics of participants. Findings indicate that openness towards seeking professional help for mental health concerns is influenced by participants’ age, marital status, gender, region of origin, education, public stigma and self-stigma towards mental health problem. Consistent with prior research, females in our study were more likely than males to have an openness toward seeking help for mental health concerns. Also, our study found that foreign-born Latinos from Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean were more open to mental health help-seeking than those from South America or born in the U.S. Findings support future research to examine broader systemic factors associated with help seeking and how they interact with sociodemographic characteristics and stigma. This study begins to address some of the factors associated with professional help-seeking for mental health concerns within a relatively homogeneous sample of Latinos residing in a border state. Latino populations are quite heterogenous, and it is important that studies adequately reflect within-group diversity, allowing for the examination of variations in help-seeking attitudes across Latino subgroups.