Understanding Immigrants' Reluctance to Use Mental Health Services: A Qualitative Study from Montreal
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Studies suggest that non-European immigrants to Canada tend to under use mental health services, compared with Canadian-born people. Social, cultural, religious, linguistic, geographic, and economic variables may contribute to this underuse. This paper explores the reasons for underuse of conventional mental health services in a community sample of immigrants with identified emotional and somatic symptoms. METHOD: Fifteen West Indian immigrants in Montreal with somatic symptoms and (or) emotional distress, not currently using mental health services, participated in a face-to-face in-depth interview exploring health care use. Interviews were analyzed thematically to discern common factors explaining reluctance to use services. RESULTS: Across participants' narratives, we identified 3 significant factors explaining their reluctance to use mental health services. First, there was a perceived overwillingness of doctors to rely on pharmaceutical medications as interventions. Second, participants perceived a dismissive attitude and lack of time from physicians in previous encounters that deterred their use of current health service. Third, many participants reported a belief in the curative power of nonmedical interventions, most notably God and to a lesser extent, traditional folk medicine. CONCLUSION: The above factors may highlight important areas for intervention to reduce disparities in immigrant use of mental health care. We present our framework as a model, grounded in empirical data, that further research can explore.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".