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Help-Seeking Behavior, Cultural Differences in
Help seeking is an interaction with others that focuses on a specific problem or emotional pain and aims at alleviating distress by means of informal or formal sources of support. It is a process that includes acknowledging a problem, deciding to get help, and determining a source of support. Choosing a source of support depends on an individual's tendency to seek or to resist formal or informal intervention during a time of crisis or following prolonged discomfort. The decision to seek professional help is influenced by individual, interpersonal, and sociocultural factors.
Help seeking is an interpersonal experience influenced by the context in which it takes place. There is evidence that sociocultural norms may exert a direct influence on help seeking, and it has been suggested that professional help seeking is related to a variety of psychosocial and cultural issues. Many scholars believe that attitudes toward help seeking are transmitted by family and social networks. All cultural groups seek help for their distress based on the meaning that culture assigns to the distress.
How Culture Influences Help Seeking
Culture includes the shared values, traditions, norms, customs, religion, arts, History, folklore, language, and/or institutions of a specific group of people. Cultural variability in the tendency to seek professional help has been a focus of empirical interest among researchers. A number of culture-related variables have been tested by researchers in search of explanations for ethnic and racial differences in the willingness to seek counseling and psychotherapy. To date, empirical findings have linked the cultural divergence in help-seeking patterns to extrinsic factors such as institutional biases and barriers, as well as intrinsic, cultural factors including acculturation, ethnic identity, self-construal, individualism-collectivism orientations, spirituality, and culture-based mental health beliefs.
Differences in relational patterns across cultures have implications for seeking help from professionals. In collectivistic cultures, such as in Asia, disclosing one's problems to professionals (an out-group) could be interpreted as dysfunctional by the in-group and viewed as a threat to in-group functioning. Therefore, people from collectivistic cultures might be more reluctant to seek professional help than people from individualistic cultures. Collectivistic cultures emphasize interdependence and social harmony within the group, with each individual viewed as fundamentally interconnected in a larger social unit. In contrast, individualistic cultures, such as in the United States, emphasize independence, distinguishing the individual as autonomous and distinct from others, with personal aims overriding group interests. Thus, seeking help is not viewed as an affront to the in-group.
Racial Differences in Help Seeking
African Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos tend to underutilize outpatient health services and overutilize emergency health services. Lack of cultural competence, lack of health insurance, and geography have been cited to explain the help-seeking patterns of people of color in the United States. Although lack of health insurance is a valid explanation for observed utilization patterns, African Americans with health insurance are still less likely to use outpatient health services than whites with similar coverage. Some researchers suggest that the tendency of African Americans to rely on informal support and on religious services hinders their access to health services. Although Latino use of specialty services and mental health services is low, their rates of physician use may be equal to that of whites, suggesting reasons other than those provided may be at play. Some researchers have suggested that the underutilization of formal services may be due to differing culturally based help-seeking strategies, and that Latino familial and kinship networks may serve as protective resources and may also act as barriers to seeking formal care.
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