A systematic review of determining factors of help-seeking behavior in response to depressive mood among adolescents

Abstract

Background Help-seeking in adolescent depression is low despite the fact that it is prevalent in this population with significant impairment. The objective of this systematic review is to identify and investigate the documented determining factors of help-seeking behavior in response to depressive mood among adolescents, which are not well known in the literature up to date.

Methods A literature search was conducted on bibliographic databases MEDLINE, pubmed, Psycinfo, EbscoHost and Ovid using “help-seeking behavior”, “adolescents”, “depression” and “depressive” as keywords to identify relevant studies up to July 1, 2016. Studies were identified by a set of inclusion and exclusion criteria with the use of the checklist “Standard Quality assessment Criteria for Evaluating Primary Research Papers” and the “STROBE” statement to evaluate the quality of individual studies.

Findings After considering the inclusion and exclusion criteria, 9 studies were identified, including 3 qualitative studies and 6 observational studies. The more distinguished determining factors were gender, ethnicity, level of depressive symptoms and parental factors. Other individual factors were readiness for care, psychiatrist supply per capita, treatment-related factors and the perceived need for help. All these factors were shown to be statistically associated with help-seeking behavior.

Conclusions Various determining factors of help-seeking behavior in response to depressive mood among adolescents were identified with the more distinguished ones such as gender, ethnicity, level of depressive symptoms and parental factors. There is paucity of high quality research in this area with lower internal validity, because of the observational in nature. Due to the heterogeneity of measurement tools of depressive symptoms and outcome measures of help-seeking behavior, cross-scale analysis was difficult to conduct. An observational study with the use of community samples, validated measurement of depressive symptoms and standardized assessment of help-seeking behavior is needed.