Seeking professional help for mental health problems, among New Zealand secondary school students

Abstract

Objective: Our aim was to investigate whether secondary school students with mental health problems sought help from general practitioners and to investigate whether mental illness type, socio-demographic variables, family, school and community factors were associated with seeking help.

Method: A randomly selected sample of 9699 secondary school students from across New Zealand participated in the Youth2000 Health and Wellbeing Survey. Data analysis included uni-variate and regression analyses.

Results: Having symptoms of anxiety (p<0.0001), depression (p<0.0001), and suicidal thoughts (p<0.0001) were associated with help seeking. However, 82%of students who had significant mental health problems had not sought help from a general practitioner. Rates of help seeking increased with age for girls and decreased with age for boys. Seeking help for mental health problems was also associated with living in a single parent family (p<0.0001), living in an over-crowded house (p=0.0006), and being well known by a teacher (p=0.0004).

Conclusions: The majority of New Zealand secondary school students with mental health problems do not obtain the help they need from general practitioners. Given the prevalence of mental health problems, it is important to find ways of identifying adolescents with difficulties and encouraging them to seek help.