Students’ reasons for being reluctant to seek help for mental health concerns in secondary schools
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Understanding adolescents' reasons for being reluctant to seek mental health help is important to improve early identification, for which schools represent important contexts. Subgroups may have unique reasons, thus requiring different strategies to overcome reluctance. Latent class analysis was conducted to identify classes of females and males based on their reasons for being reluctant to seek help from school adults. We used cross-sectional survey data collected in 2018-2019 from 70,794 students attending 136 Canadian secondary schools. The most frequently reported reason was preferring to handle problems themselves. Five-class solutions resulted, with four similar classes in males and females: "low reluctance", "go alone", "stigma", and a class with high probabilities for all provided reasons. A "wouldn't know who" (to approach) class in females and a "no one I would feel comfortable talking to" class in males also resulted. Students with depression and anxiety had higher odds of belonging to all reluctant classes relative to the low reluctance class. Help seeking reluctancy in school contexts remains common, particularly among students that may be most in need of support. Many adolescents that prefer to handle problems themselves have concerns about confidentiality and perceptions that school adults would not be able to help.
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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 | 0.000 | 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".