The Relationship Between Hope and Stigma in the Decision to Seek Mental Health Treatment

Abstract

There is a significant disparity between the number of people who could benefit from mental health treatment and the number of people who seek mental health treatment. Barriers to treatment can include self-reliance and stoicism, a lack of trust for health providers, and, importantly, concern for stigma. Mental health self-stigma has been identified as a primary factor, yet there is a paucity of research examining self-stigma in context with other explicit and implicit influences on the decision-making process involved in a person’s decision to seek treatment. In this study, participants sourced from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (n = 150) were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions to review and select options for navigating a mental health challenge, as well as report on characteristics such as hope, cognitive and psychological flexibility, distress tolerance, self-stigma, and situational and dispositional forms of rationality and intuition. Self-stigma was observed to have a large and significant association with the decision to seek treatment (β = -.494, p < .001). Hope, while not directly related to the decision to seek treatment (β = .010, p = .912), was related to other characteristics, such as cognitive flexibility (β = .433, p < .001), which did display a significant relationship with stigma (β = -.402, p = .001) and facets of distress tolerance. This study reveals hope and cognitive flexibility as potential avenues for intervention in an attempt to address stigma and promote mental health treatment.