(PS9-D85) Do Momentary Levels of Shame and Suicidal Thinking Decrease the Likelihood of Support Seeking Behaviors in a College Population?

With suicide being a pervasive public health issue, it is more important than ever to understand barriers to its help and support seeking behaviors. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with a history of suicide thinking and behaviors (STBs) are less inclined to seek out treatment compared to those without a history (Reynders et al., 2015). Further, because shame has been shown to mediate help-seeking attitudes in folks with a variety of psychopathologies (Barta & Kiropoulos, 2023) and is a demonstrated predictor of suicide (Brown et al., 2009), it is reasonable to believe that initial attitudes towards mental health treatment and shame in the presence of STBs may influence the degree to which someone engages in help and support seeking behaviors. The current study hypothesized that baseline levels of help-seeking attitudes would decrease the likelihood of support seeking behaviors after momentary shame and suicide thinking. 

Participants (N = 432) were college students that were involved in a larger study completing 6x daily ecological momentary assessment prompts across a total of 11,428 days. We found that more positive attitudes towards help seeking  at baseline were associated with lower odds of daily help seeking (OR = 0.96, 95% = 0.95,0.99, p=.047), however this relationship was not moderated by momentary ratings of suicidal thinking (OR = 1.00, 95% CI= 0.99,1.01, p = .860) or of shame (OR = 1.22, 95% CI =0.92,1.61, p = .161).   

This study suggests that college students with generally negative opinions of seeking out treatment may be less inclined to seek out support from others in their daily lives. Future research should continue to elucidate characteristics or events that motivate support seeking behaviors, especially when there is already a preexisting stigma towards asking for help.