Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience (IoPPN), King's College London, London SE5 8AF, UK.
Department of Population Health and Environmental Sciences, Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, King's College London, London SE1 9RT, UK.
Int J Environ Res Public Health. 2020 Jul 9;17(14):4965. doi: 10.3390/ijerph17144965.
Men are less likely to seek help for mental health difficulties and this process is often used to help explain the disproportionally higher suicide rates compared to women. Furthermore, university students are often regarded as a vulnerable population group with a lower propensity to seek help. Thus, male students are a very high-risk group that is even more reluctant to seek help for mental health difficulties, placing them at high risk of suicide. Often, student mental health problems are highlighted in the media, but very few evidence-based solutions specifically designed for male students exist. The current paper seeks to provide a comprehensive framework about how to better design mental health interventions that seek to improve male students' willingness to access psychological support. The Medical Research Council's (MRC's) framework for developing a complex intervention was used to develop an intervention relevant to male students. In this paper, previous help-seeking interventions and their evaluation methods are first described, secondly, a theoretical framework outlining the important factors male students face when accessing support, and thirdly, how these factors can be mapped onto a model of behaviour change to inform the development of an evidence-based intervention are discussed. Finally, an example intervention with specific functions and behaviour change techniques is provided to demonstrate how this framework can be implemented and evaluated. It is hoped that this framework can be used to help reduce the disparity between male and female students seeking mental health support.
男性不太可能寻求心理健康问题的帮助，而这一过程通常被用来帮助解释与女性相比，男性自杀率过高的原因。此外，大学生通常被视为一个弱势群体，他们寻求帮助的意愿较低。因此，男学生是一个非常高风险的群体，他们更不愿意寻求心理健康问题的帮助，这使他们面临很高的自杀风险。通常，学生的心理健康问题会在媒体上被强调，但很少有专门针对男学生的基于证据的解决方案。本文旨在提供一个全面的框架，探讨如何更好地设计旨在提高男学生寻求心理支持意愿的心理健康干预措施。本文首先描述了以前的寻求帮助的干预措施及其评估方法，其次，概述了男学生在寻求支持时面临的重要因素的理论框架，第三，如何将这些因素映射到行为改变模型上，为制定基于证据的干预措施提供信息。最后，提供了一个具有特定功能和行为改变技术的示例干预措施，以展示如何实施和评估该框架。希望该框架能够帮助减少男女生寻求心理健康支持的差距。
