Accepted for/Published in: JMIR Mental Health
Date Submitted: Jan 31, 2019
Open Peer Review Period: Feb 1, 2019 - Mar 16, 2019
Date Accepted: May 27, 2019
(closed for review but you can still tweet)
Online Help-Seeking in Young Adults: An Online Survey
ABSTRACT
Background:
Young people have been recognised as being particularly vulnerable to experiencing mental health difficulties during adolescence and very few seek treatment or help during this time. Online help-seeking may offer an additional domain where young people can seek help 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 behaviours and preferences of young people.
Methods:
This study made use of an anonymous online survey. Young people aged 18-25 living in Ireland participated in the survey and were recruited through social media ads on Twitter and Facebook.
Results:
A total of 1308 respondents completed the survey. A majority of the respondents (80.66%, 1055/1308) indicated that they would use their mobile phone to look for help for a personal or emotional concern online. When looking for help online, 82.57% (1080/1308) of participants made use of an Internet search whilst 57.03% (746/1308) would make 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 whilst 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 found them to be ‘trustworthy’ or ‘very trustworthy’. Most of the respondents (82.95%, 1085/1308) indicated that 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% 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% 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 web-based mental health resources to assist them with their mental health concerns. However, levels of satisfaction with the available resources are varied. 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.
Citation
Request queued. Please wait while the file is being generated. It may take some time.
Copyright
© The authors. All rights reserved. This is a privileged document currently under peer-review/community review (or an accepted/rejected manuscript). Authors have provided JMIR Publications with an exclusive license to publish this preprint on it's website for review and ahead-of-print citation purposes only. While the final peer-reviewed paper may be licensed under a cc-by license on publication, at this stage authors and publisher expressively prohibit redistribution of this draft paper other than for review purposes.