Department of Social Sciences, Beijing Normal University-Hong Kong Baptist University United International College, Zhuhai, China.
Daphne Cockwell School of Nursing, Faculty of Community Services, Toronto Metropolitan University, Toronto, Canada.
J Ment Health. 2024 Jun;33(3):386-393. doi: 10.1080/09638237.2024.2361259. Epub 2024 Jun 6.
Mental illnesses and mental health challenges have become increasingly pervasive among Chinese university students. However, the utilization rate of mental health services is low among students.
We aimed to explore Chinese university students' help-seeking behaviors to understand how they deal with mental health challenges and use the results to inform the development of effective mental health promotion initiatives.
In this study, we conducted 13 focus group interviews with students in six universities in Jinan, China, including 91 (62%) female students and 56 (38%) male students. We drew on the Theory of Planned Behaviors to guide our thematic analysis to gain a contextual understanding of participants' accounts on help-seeking.
Our results have depicted the help-seeking patterns of Chinese university students and show that there are four major behaviors which are self-reliance, seeking support from peers and families, seeking professional support, and accessing virtual mental health care.
Results from this study can be used to inform the development of mental health literacy programming for students in universities that share similar contexts, and the study has also opened up a new space for using qualitative approaches to study mental health needs and access to care in diverse populations.
精神疾病和精神健康挑战在中国大学生中越来越普遍。然而，学生对心理健康服务的利用率很低。
我们旨在探讨中国大学生的寻求帮助行为，以了解他们如何应对精神健康挑战，并利用研究结果为有效的精神健康促进计划的制定提供信息。
本研究在中国济南市的六所大学中进行了 13 次焦点小组访谈，共有 91 名（62%）女性学生和 56 名（38%）男性学生参加。我们借鉴计划行为理论来指导我们的主题分析，以深入了解参与者在寻求帮助方面的叙述。
我们的研究结果描绘了中国大学生的寻求帮助模式，表明存在四种主要行为，即自力更生、寻求同伴和家庭的支持、寻求专业支持以及使用虚拟心理健康服务。
这项研究的结果可用于为具有相似背景的大学学生制定心理健康素养计划提供信息，并且该研究也为使用定性方法研究不同人群的精神健康需求和获得护理开辟了新的空间。
