Perceived Need, Mental Health Literacy, Neuroticism and Self- Stigma Predict Mental Health Service Use Among Older Adults
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVES: Older adults are the least likely age group to seek mental health services. However, few studies have explored a comprehensive range of sociodemographic, psychological, and social barriers and facilitators to seeking treatment in later life. METHODS: A cross-sectional, national sample of Canadian older adults (55+, N = 2,745) completed an online survey including reliable and valid measures of predisposing, enabling, and need characteristics, based on Andersen's behavioral model of health, as well as self-reported use of mental health services. Univariate and hierarchical logistic regressions predicted past 5-year mental health service use. RESULTS: Mental health service use was most strongly and consistently associated with greater perceived need (OR = 11.48) and mental health literacy (OR = 2.16). Less self-stigma of seeking help (OR = .65) and greater neuroticism (OR = 1.57) also predicted help-seeking in our final model, although their effects were not as strong or consistent across gender, marital status, and age subgroups. CONCLUSIONS: The need category was crucial to seeking help, but predisposing psychological factors were also significant barriers to treatment. CLINICAL IMPLICATIONS: Interventions that target older adults high in neuroticism by improving perceptions of need for treatment, mental health literacy, and self-stigma of seeking help may be particularly effective ways of improving access to mental health services.
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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) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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".