Stigma as a Predictor of Parental Willingness to Seek Mental Health Services for Their Children in Rural America

Background Stigma exists in some capacity towards mental illness. This stigma is a barrier to mental health services for some people. Rural populations are known to have more stigma than their urban counterparts. This can be partly attributed to the rural value system and the lack anonymity in the tight-knit communities. This is on top of already lacking access to mental health services. This especially affects children. A 2015 study on low-income, urban, African-Americans found self-stigma as a predictor of help seeking. The first study focusing on parental stigma of seeking mental health services for their children in rural America done in 2015 found stigma to be negatively correlated with willingness to seek help. This study sought to explore this relationship in a more generalized sample. Methods I posted a survey on Amazon Mechanical Turk that screened for rural parents of children under the age of 18. It included a two-factor measure of self and public stigma and a one item assessment of willingness to seek mental health services for their children. 81 responses were used to analyze for correlational relationships between variables including age, gender, perceived public stigma, perceived self-stigma, and willingness to seek mental health services for their children. Results There was a significant positive correlation between public and self-stigma (p=.000, r= .784). There was a significant negative correlation between self-stigma and age (p=.013, r=-.281). There was also a significant negative correlation between self-stigma and expressed willingness to seek help from a mental health professional for children (p=.042, r=-.231). Conclusions The finding that more perceived self-stigma makes someone less likely to seek mental health services supports findings from previous studies. However, it is curious that only self-stigma and not public stigma was found to be a predictor. More studies would have to be done to establish a cause and effect relationship