(PS8-B38) Impact of Parental Stigma and Type of Psychoeducation on Mental Health Attitudes and Help-seeking Intentions

Parental stigma is a significant barrier to youth receiving needed mental health care. Our field’s understanding of what influences parental stigma, and how parental stigma may impact parent behavior is limited, though. In this study of 100 parents of adolescents recruited through MTurk, we assessed 1) the relationship between multiple stigma subtypes (public, perceived, and self-stigma) and parental attitudes towards help-seeking and willingness to seek help for their child if needed, and 2) the impact of publicly available psychoeducation materials on parental stigma and parents' attitudes and willingness to seek treatment, randomly assigning parents to receive psychoeducation on depression (from the CDC) or psychoeducation on children’s general mental health and brain development (from the NIH). Parents' self-stigma, perceived stigma, and public stigma were significantly related to their attitudes towards mental health services and their help-seeking intentions for their children, yet not always in the hypothesized directions.

Parents who reported more public stigma (e.g., beliefs that the public devalues children with mental illness and has negative perceptions about depression) and self-stigma (e.g., held stigmatizing beliefs about depression, childhood mental illness, and children using psychiatric meds) were more likely to report more negative attitudes about seeking services. However,  parents who noted more negative attitudes about children using psychiatric medication (p = .20) and who believed the public stigmatized children with mental illness (p = .29) were more likely to report that they would seek treatment for their children if needed. 

It is possible that, irrespective of parents’ views towards mental health services, if a parent believes their child is suffering from a highly stigmatized mental illness, they will be more likely to want to address their child’s mental illness with treatment. 

Lastly, psychoeducational content significantly impacted attitudes and beliefs about seeking treatment. Parents who received general psychoeducation demonstrated a significant increase in positive attitudes about mental health services compared to parents who received depression-specific information (an interaction effect; p = .001). Interestingly, in both conditions, parents reported lower intentions to seek treatment after having read any psychoeducational material (p = .027). Yet, parents' concerns about being stigmatized if they sought treatment were also reduced (p = .007). Implications for studying stigma subtypes will be discussed, in addition to implications for how our field presents psychoeducation materials – and how this may unintentionally increase stigmatizing beliefs and barriers to care. This is especially important as we grapple with the differential impact of stigma may have for groups of people who have faced systemic oppression, and the additional barriers to care faced by youth with minoritized backgrounds.