Understanding and Addressing Unmet Need for Mental Health Services in College Populations.

college student mental health;Public Health;Health Sciences;Social Sciences;Independent Interdepartmental Degree Program

Lipson, Sarah KetchenPosselt, Julie Renee ;

University of Michigan

关键词: college student mental health;    Public Health;    Health Sciences;    Social Sciences;    Independent Interdepartmental Degree Program;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/133195/sklipson_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

In my dissertation, the main problem of interest is that the majority of college students with mental health problems (roughly 60%) do not receive treatment. This problem is quantified as the ;;treatment gap”. Population-level interventions to promote help-seeking commonly focus on reducing stigma, improving knowledge, and increasing access. Overall, these interventions have had limited success in changing students’ help-seeking behaviors. I argue that new approaches are needed to narrow the campus mental health treatment gap.Through detailed descriptive analyses of two large-scale, primary data sets, I find that stigma, misinformation, and lack of access do not appear to be the most salient barriers to treatment for students in need. Instead, students most commonly report not seeking help for reasons that imply lack of urgency and lack of perceived need: ;;I haven’t had a need”, ;;I question how serious my needs are”, and ;;I don’t have time”. These reasons are not directly accounted for in current campus help-seeking interventions.In response to this, I introduce and evaluate a new approach based on concepts from behavioral economics and social psychology. This approach acknowledges cognitive biases that may impede mental health service utilization, namely social comparison bias, problematic time preferences, and procrastination. These interrelated biases offer a lens through which to understand the pervasive lack of urgency surrounding help-seeking for mental health. To address these biases, I designed an online intervention for undergraduates with untreated symptoms of eating disorders, as identified in a baseline screen. Through weekly messages, the intervention tried to reframe the help-seeking decision and facilitate the link to treatment. Findings suggest that the intervention had modest but significant effects on help-seeking behavior and attitudes. Most notably, 8% of students received treatment, representing a more than three-fold increase in help-seeking behavior over the 12-week study period. Though there were statistically significant effects on treatment utilization, over 90% of students were still untreated after the intervention. Based on findings from the survey data and feedback collected through post-intervention interviews, I describe specific next steps for optimizing the intervention and overarching priorities for addressing the campus mental health treatment gap moving forward.