WHY THE SILENCE? MULTIDIMENSIONAL BARRIERS AND AN INTEGRATED EXPLANATION FOR THE AVOIDANCE OF OFFLINE PROFESSIONAL HELP AMONG INDIVIDUALS WITH DEPRESSION: A NARRATIVE REVIEW
Keywords:
Depression, Help-seeking behavior, Treatment gap, Stigma, Digital mental health, Literature reviewAbstract
Many individuals with depression who need treatment do not seek professional help. This paper systematically reviews the main barriers to offline help-seeking among people with depression through a literature review and provides an integrated analysis from the perspectives of individual psychology, cognition, structural factors, sociocultural context, and digital environment. The findings show that stigma, fear of seeking help, structural barriers, cognitive biases, personality traits, and the substitution effect of the digital environment interact to create a complex, layered barrier to help-seeking. Although existing interventions can help improve help-seeking intentions, they often fail to convert these intentions into actual help-seeking behavior, revealing an “intention-behavior gap.” This paper also proposes an integrated explanatory framework and offers implications for digital mental health services and science communication.References
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