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Background Less than half of youth who need mental health treatment receive care. Parents’ help-seeking perspectives are a well established predictor of youth mental health service utilization. Thus, efforts to increase youth engagement in treatment requires an understanding of predictors of parents’ help-seeking perspectives. Prior research shows parents’ clinical experiences (i.e. appraisal of child symptoms, personal mental health status, parenting stress) affect their perspectives on help-seeking. However, the unique influence of these factors on specific help-seeking perspectives remain underexplored.Objective To investigate the impact of clinical characteristics on three aspects of parental help-seeking perspectives: attitudes, stigma, and intentions.Method Four hundred thirty-eight parents of children ages 4 to 17 years completed an online survey including measures of child internalizing and externalizing symptoms, parental mental health symptoms, parenting stress, and help-seeking perspectives. Hierarchical regression analyses examined the prediction of three distinct help-seeking perspectives (i.e. attitudes, intentions, and stigma) from parents’ clinical characteristics.Results Correlations showed parents’ clinical characteristics are associated with their help-seeking attitudes, stigma, and intentions. Child internalizing symptoms and parental mental health symptoms showed limited associations with help-seeking perspectives. When the predictive ability of the three clinical characteristics was examined together in a regression model, parenting stress significantly predicted all three help-seeking perspectives, with greater stress linked to more-negative attitudes, increased stigma, and lower intentions to seek care. Parental mental health symptoms significantly predict help-seeking attitudes. Parent-report of child symptoms did not predict parent help-seeking perspectives when examined with parenting stress and parental mental health.Conclusions Findings suggest parenting stress is a factor influencing parents’ perspectives on seeking mental health care for youth. Conversely, parents’ appraisal of child symptoms and their own experience of symptoms had limited influence. Findings underscore the need for programming to address parenting stress as a potential barrier to help-seeking.
Holly et al. (Wed,) studied this question.