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. 2016 Mar 11;11(3):e0151298.
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0151298. eCollection 2016.

The Recognition of Mental Illness, Schizophrenia Identification, and Help-Seeking from Friends in Late Adolescence

Syudo Yamasaki  1 , Shuntaro Ando  1   2 , Shinji Shimodera  3 , Kaori Endo  1   2 , Yuji Okazaki  4   5 , Nozomu Asukai  1   6 , Satoshi Usami  7 , Atsushi Nishida  1 , Tsukasa Sasaki  8
Affiliations

The Recognition of Mental Illness, Schizophrenia Identification, and Help-Seeking from Friends in Late Adolescence

Syudo Yamasaki et al. PLoS One. .

Abstract

Objective: The recognition of mental illness without anticipating stigma might encourage adolescents' help-seeking behavior. We aimed to identify the relationship between mental illness identification and adolescents' intention to seek help if faced with mental illness.

Method: We examined the relationships between help-seeking intentions and recognition of mental illness (RMI) without correctly identifying the disease name, as well as correct labelling of schizophrenia (LSC) using a vignette about a person with schizophrenia in a cross-sectional survey of 9,484 Japanese high-school students aged 15-18 years.

Results: When compared with adolescents who were unable to recognize the mental illness (UMI) in the vignette, those in the RMI group reported they were significantly more likely to seek help from friends (odds ratio [OR] = 1.29; 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.17-1.41; P < 0.001) and expressed an increased likelihood to seek help from professionals (all P < .05). Those in the LSC group reported they were significantly less likely to exhibit help-seeking behavior (OR = 0.77, 95% CI = 0.65-0.92, P = 0.003) and expressed an increased likelihood of help-seeking from health professionals than the UMI group (all P < .05).

Conclusion: The ability to recognize mental illness without identifying the disease may increase help-seeking from friends, while the ability to identify the disease as schizophrenia might decrease late adolescents' help-seeking. To promote help-seeking behavior among adolescents, improving their ability to recognize mental illness generally is recommended.

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Conflict of interest statement

Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Figures

Fig 1
Fig 1. Percentages of subjects in each group seeking help from different sources according to their responses to the case vignette of schizophrenia.
Notes. UMI: unable to recognize mental illness; RMI: recognition of mental illness but not being able to correctly label the illness; LSC: correctly labelling the case in the vignette with schizophrenia; OR: odds ratio for the responses to the case vignette of schizophrenia (adjusted for gender and age); refs.: the UMI group was the reference category in the logistic regression. *: P < 0.05, **: P < 0.01, ***: P < 0.001
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