Unspoken norms and silent struggles: A scoping review of cultural ınfluences on adults’ mental health help-seeking

INTRODUCTION: The purpose of this scoping review is to synthesize the existing literature on cultural factors influencing mental health help-seeking attitudes to understand how different cultural groups perceive mental disorders and how these perceptions influence their mental health help-seeking attitudes.
METHODS: The scoping review utilized a six-step protocol that included the following key steps: formulating the research question, conducting a literature search, selecting studies, charting the data to extract relevant information from each selected study, collating and summarizing the findings, and disseminating the results.
RESULTS: A total of 1,065 studies were retrieved through electronic databases. Of these, 28 peer-reviewed articles were included in the study. The findings from this scoping review reveal that cultural elements such as attitudes toward mental illness, cultural beliefs about the etiology of mental illnesses, acculturation, and the use of alternative treatment modalities influence mental health help-seeking attitudes and behaviors across different cultural groups. Communities with negative beliefs about mental illness and those that associate mental illness with supernatural causes have lower rates of mental health service utilization and higher rates of social stigma and self-stigma.
DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners can utilize the findings from this scoping review to provide culturally competent mental health services. These findings can be used in policymaking to improve mental health help-seeking behaviors across different cultural and ethnic groups by facilitating access to culturally competent psychiatric care.

Keywords: Atitude, culture, help-seeking, help-seeking behavior, mental health disorders