Young People Seeking Help Online for Mental Health: Cross-Sectional Survey Study

Abstract

Background Young people are particularly vulnerable to experiencing mental health difficulties, but very few seek treatment or help during this time. Online help-seeking may offer an additional domain where young people can seek aid for mental health difficulties, yet our current understanding of how young people seek help online is limited. Objective This was an exploratory study which aimed to investigate the online help-seeking behaviors and preferences of young people. Methods This study made use of an anonymous online survey. Young people aged 18-25, living in Ireland, were recruited through social media ads on Twitter and Facebook and participated in the survey. Results A total of 1308 respondents completed the survey. Many of the respondents (80.66%; 1055/1308) indicated that they would use their mobile phone to look online for help for a personal or emotional concern. When looking for help online, 82.57% (1080/1308) of participants made use of an Internet search, while 57.03% (746/1308) made use of a health website. When asked about their satisfaction with these resources, 36.94% (399/1080) indicated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with an Internet search while 49.33% (368/746) indicated that they were satisfied or very satisfied with a health website. When asked about credibility, health websites were found to be the most trustworthy, with 39.45% (516/1308) indicating that they found them to be trustworthy or very trustworthy. Most of the respondents (82.95%; 1085/1308) indicated that a health service logo was an important indicator of credibility, as was an endorsement by schools and colleges (54.97%; 719/1308). Important facilitators of online help-seeking included the anonymity and confidentiality offered by the Internet, with 80% (1046/1308) of the sample indicating that it influenced their decision a lot or quite a lot. A noted barrier was being uncertain whether information on an online resource was reliable, with 55.96% (732/1308) of the respondents indicating that this influenced their decision a lot or quite a lot. Conclusions Findings from this survey suggest that young people are engaging with web-based mental health resources to assist them with their mental health concerns. However, levels of satisfaction with the available resources vary. Young people are engaging in strategies to assign credibility to web-based resources, however, uncertainty around their reliability is a significant barrier to online help-seeking.

Impact of Online Mental Health Screening Tools on Help-Seeking, Care Receipt, and Suicidal Ideation and Suicidal Intent: Evidence from Internet Search Behavior in a Large U.S. Cohort

“…The current study examined the ability to predict mental health outcomes based on exposure to online screening tools in a naturalistic sample of 126,060 participants. Supporting prior research examining the potential impact of screens on mental health outcomes (Batterham and Calear, 2017;Choi et al, 2018;Cronly et al, 2018;Drake et al, 2014;Fitzsimmons-Craft et al, 2019;King et al, 2015;McDonald et al, 2019;Pretorius et al, 2019;Rowlands et al, 2015), the results suggested that the type of content displayed on these online screens could independently predict future mental health outcomes. This evinces that the content of online screening tools has meaningful relationships to mental health outcomes, showing the largest impact on searches for mental-health self-references and mental health self-diagnosis.…”

“…real-world conditions) trials (Singal et al, 2014). Although there have been reviews (Hassem and Laher, 2019;Iragorri and Spackman, 2018) and a number of research endeavors looking at the (i) accuracy/efficacy (Cronly et al, 2018;Fitzsimmons-Craft et al, 2019;McDonald et al, 2019), (ii) user demographic characteristics (Choi et al, 2018;Rowlands et al, 2015), (iii) user levels of engagement (King et al, 2015), and/or (iv) user opinions and preferences of mental health digital screening tools as they apply to more demographically and clinically homogeneous populations (Batterham and Calear, 2017;Drake et al, 2014;Pretorius et al, 2019), there is no known research to date which has evaluated the impact of these screens within large and more generalizable populations. Many mental health advocacy sites provide mental health screens to the public based on these efficacy studies.…”

“…later searching for psychiatrists), and (3) potential indicators of receipt of care (e.g. searches for specific psychoactive medications, may be an indicator of received mental treatment (Pretorius et al, 2019) and has been validated in prior research examining the impact of adverse drug reactions (Yom-Tov and Gabrilovich, 2013), as well as potential risks, including (4) suicidal ideation (i.e. searching about thoughts related to suicide and/or death, e.g.…”

Eating Disorder Awareness Campaigns: Thematic and Quantitative Analysis Using Twitter

“…They failed to increase the percentage of tweets related to medical content, in contrast to previous evidence showing that tweets with medical content generated special interest among Twitter users [ 24 ]. A study performed within a population of young people highlighted the use of scientific data as being a key indicator of credibility in online resources [ 20 ]. The scarcity of medical content found by our study has also been reported in other awareness initiatives focused on other medical diseases, such as several prevalent types of cancer [ 25 ].…”

“…Despite these efforts to help, evidence nevertheless suggests that those experiencing eating disorder thoughts and behaviors are less likely to seek help for their mental health difficulties [ 19 ]. One recent study even reported that body image was the second leading personal concern for which people between the ages of 18 and 25 years sought help online [ 20 ].…”