Abstract
Seeking professional help for psychological distress is generally associated with improved outcomes and lower levels of distress. Given the saliency of religious teachings, it has been shown that aspects of Christian belief may influence adherents’ attitudes towards mental health help-seeking. Based on existing research on American Evangelicals, it was hypothesised that religious social support would positively predict attitudes towards mental health help-seeking, whilst fundamentalism, mental distress, and the belief that psychopathology is caused by immoral or sinful living would negatively predict participants’ attitudes. On a convenience sample of 252 British Evangelicals, our hypotheses were supported and these variables significantly predicted participants’ attitudes towards seeking mental health help, F(7,243) = 9.64, p < 0.001, R2 = 0.195. These findings together suggest that whilst religious support positively predicts help-seeking attitudes, Evangelical fundamentalism, in addition to beliefs that mental illness has a spiritual cause, as well as experiences of mental distress may be associated with more negative attitudes towards psychotherapeutic intervention. Thus, mental health practitioners should be aware of clients’ religious worldviews and tailor interventions appropriately, acknowledging that working with religious organisations may yield the most positive outcomes for patients.
Highlights
With evidence of increasing rates of mental illness (Calling et al, 2017; Patalay and Gage, 2019), there is growing concern over the personal and socioeconomic impact of psychological distress (McDaid et al, 2019; Ausín et al, 2020)
The current study aimed to investigate the relative contributions of the following variables in predicting Evangelical Christians’ attitudes towards seeking mental health help: (i) psychiatric pathogenesis beliefs that mental illness is caused by immoral or sinful living, (ii) religious support, (iii) psychological distress, and (iv) religious fundamentalism
Our results revealed support for our hypotheses in that higher fundamentalism, psychological distress, and psychiatric pathogenesis beliefs were significantly correlated with less positive attitudes towards mental health help-seeking
Summary
With evidence of increasing rates of mental illness (Calling et al, 2017; Patalay and Gage, 2019), there is growing concern over the personal and socioeconomic impact of psychological distress (McDaid et al, 2019; Ausín et al, 2020). Research has shown that supportive attitudes towards mental illness and help-seeking are indispensable in mitigating barriers against service utilisation (ten Have et al, 2010; Mojtabai et al, 2016). It seems that a sizable proportion of the adult population have limited ontological and aetiological knowledge of psychiatric problems, which negatively influences their help-seeking attitudes (Jorm, 2000; Rüsch et al, 2011). Psychological Distress, Help-Seeking and Evangelicalism treatment (Araya et al, 2018) despite the finding that psychotherapeutic care is efficacious for a number of mental health conditions (McAleavey et al, 2019). Taken together, understanding the factors that influence people’s attitudes towards therapeutic interventions is important in tackling barriers against service non-utilisation
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