Age, gender, and the underutilization of mental health services: The influence of help-seeking attitudes
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The objectives of this study were to explore age and gender differences in attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help, and to examine whether attitudes negatively influence intentions to seek help among older adults and men, whose mental health needs are underserved. To achieve these objectives 206 community-dwelling adults completed questionnaires measuring help-seeking attitudes, psychiatric symptomatology, prior help-seeking, and intentions to seek help. Older age and female gender were associated with more positive help-seeking attitudes in this sample, although age and gender interacted with marital status and education, and had varying influences on different attitude components. Age and gender also influenced intentions to seek professional psychological help. Women exhibited more favourable intentions to seek help from mental health professionals than men, likely due to their positive attitudes concerning psychological openness. Older adults exhibited more favourable intentions to seek help from primary care physicians than younger adults, a finding that was not explained by age differences in attitudes. Results from this study suggest that negative attitudes related to psychological openness might contribute to men's underutilization of mental health services. Help-seeking attitudes do not appear to be a barrier to seeking professional help among older adults, although their intentions to visit primary care physicians might be. These findings suggest the need for education to improve men's help-seeking attitudes and to enhance older adults' willingness to seek specialty mental health services.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".