College Students' Beliefs about Depression, Perceptions of Treatments, and Help-Seeking
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Depression is a common mental health concern among college students. To better understand students’ service needs, it is imperative to explore their perceptions of professional treatments and help-seeking intentions. The existing literature highlighted the need to investigate students’ etiological beliefs about depression. This study examined students’ beliefs about the biological, psychosocial, and systemic causes of depression and the relationship between such beliefs and their perceptions of antidepressants, counselling, and help-seeking intentions. Methods : 201 college students were recruited from Canada and the USA to complete an online survey consisting of measures on etiological beliefs, attitudes toward treatments, and help- seeking intentions. Using a series of hierarchical regression analyses, we examined the associations between etiological beliefs and measures of treatment attitudes and help-seeking intentions, while controlling for sex and depression status. Results: The results showed that endorsing biological explanations of depression was positively associated with the perceived benefits of antidepressants and negatively linked to the perceived risks of antidepressants. Endorsing psychosocial explanations was positively associated with help-seeking intentions for suicidal thoughts. Moreover, male students were more likely to view counselling as risky and less likely to see the benefit of antidepressants and counselling than female students. Last, students with higher depressive symptoms were less likely to engage in help-seeking and more likely to see the risk of counselling. Conclusions: Understanding students’ etiological beliefs about depression could help tailor effective mental health interventions on college campuses and improve support for students with depression and suicidal thoughts.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| 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".