Consultation of mental health professionals by French adolescents with probable psychiatric problems

Abstract

A national sample of school-attending adolescents aged 12-20 years (n = 8435) filled out an anonymous self-administered questionnaire. We considered a group of 868 adolescents with probable psychiatric problems (PPP) in order to identify personal, psychological and environmental factors as well as help-seeking behaviour associated with consultation of mental health professionals (MHP). Among the adolescents with PPP, 13.7% consulted MHP at least once during the year. Logistic regression analysis showed that consultation with MHP was more frequent for adolescents with multiple problems (OR = 2.3), functional physical disorders (OR = 1.9), family problems (OR = 2), separated parents (OR = 4.4) or multiple contacts with other doctors (GP, school doctor and other specialists, OR = 2.2, 3.6 and 2.6, respectively), and among those who confided in teachers or youth group advisors (OR = 2.2). Those who confided in peers consulted MHP less often (OR = 0.5). However, consultation with MHP was not associated with other sociodemographic or educational characteristics, with type of problem (internalized or externalized), or with confiding in one's parents.

Help seeking for emotional and behavioural problems in children and adolescents

“…In childhood and early adolescence more help is sought for boys, whereas in late adolescence, girls seek help more frequently [16,19,20,41,50]. This finding may result from the fact that externalising problems, which are more prevalent in boys than girls, tend to decrease with age, whereas internalising problems, which are more typical for girls, tend to increase with age.…”

“…Confirmation has also been found for the influence of parental attitudes and beliefs [17,37], education level [15,26,40], and family stress [11,19,20,31,42,50] on help seeking.…”

“…Although the presence of child psychopathology does not automatically lead to parental problem recognition [37], the chance of concern about, and help seeking for child psychopathology was confirmed to increase with comorbidity [20,23], and with increasing severity and persistence of problems [2,6,15,18,23,34,42]. Adolescents' experience of psychological distress and functional impairment was confirmed to increase their help seeking [33,39,48,49].…”

“…While several studies have confirmed the hypothesis of an increased chance of problem recognition and help seeking for externalising problems [8,37,48], others have found an opposite effect [23], or no effect at all [20,42,45].…”

Help-Seeking for Child Psychopathology: Pathways to Informal and Professional Services in The Netherlands

“…Because every inhabitant is, in principle, covered by private or public health insurance, no major financial constraints hamper the availability of care in the Dutch health care system. As was found for countries with comparable financial availability of health care (Gasquet et al, 1997(Gasquet et al, , 1999Sourander et al, 2001;Verhulst and Van der Ende, 1997), the socioeconomic indicators included in our model (education level, income, type of insurance) are expected not to affect service need or use directly. They are, however, hypothesized to affect the presence of child psychopathology.…”