Perceived Mental Health Stigma and Help Seeking Behaviour among Psychology Students: The Moderating Role of Social Support

Abstract

There is significant psychological distress among university students and not many seek professional mental health services. Frequently, perceived stigma is cited as a block to help-seeking, and social support can facilitate professional help-seeking or serve as an informal alternative to it. The aim of this study was to investigate help-seeking behaviors and the relationship between help-seeking behaviors and perceived mental health stigma among psychology students, as well as test the moderating effects of perceived social support. The cross-sectional correlational design was employed with 300 undergraduate/postgraduate psychology students from Universities of Rawalpindi and Islamabad, Pakistan. Participants filled out Stigma Scale, Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support, and General Help-Seeking Questionnaire. All the data were analyzed with descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, linear regressions, and moderation analyses using PROCESS Macro. Help-seeking was weakly, non-significantly, negatively correlated with perceived stigma, r = -.06, p > .05, and was not significantly predicted by perceived stigma, β =-.06, p = .35. There was also no significant correlation between social support and help-seeking r = .08, p > .05. There was no moderation for the stigma × social support interaction, B = .00, p = .68. The findings indicate that stigma and perceived social support in general do not explain help-seeking behaviour among psychology students very well. Concepts of mental health, informal support, access to service, confidentiality issues, and attitudes to counselling may be more relevant and worth investigating in subsequent research.