Gender, Age and Social Stigma: The Coping strategy Choice on Mental Health and Attitudes Towards Help-seeking

DOI

10.2991/assehr.k.220105.034How to use a DOI?

Keywords

gender; help-seeking; men; masculinity; social sigma; self-regulation

Abstract

The tendency of many men not to seek help and dilute their physical and mental health symptoms has become a common public image of men. Admitting a problem and asking for help may be seen as a sign of weakness for men, so they associate seeking psychological or emotional help with shame or weakness. This paper focuses on the significance of gender to help-seeking. The first objective of this study is to explore the differences in the choice with mental health problems between different genders. And another purpose of this study was to explore gender differences in attitudes towards seeking professional psychological help. This work analyzed the self-questionnaire about a hundred and twenty-seven participants of both sexes ranging from ages 15-50. Participants responded to 6 questions, including 3 basic pieces of information and 3 questions assessing their attitudes toward help-seeking. To investigate the self-questionnaire statistically, this work performed a Chi-Square Test of Independence in Excel to predict the association between gender and coping strategies when encountering psychological barriers, and between gender and people’s attitudes towards help-seeking. Since the p-value in each part is not less than 0.05, the results cannot conclude that those associations are accurate. Although this work does not have enough solid data to support our two hypotheses, previous studies have confirmed the correlation between social stigma and gender, and we will further study the impact of social stigma on gender mental health, especially on help-seeking.

Copyright

© 2022 The Authors. Published by Atlantis Press SARL.

Open Access

This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Jiani Zhang
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/01/17
TI  - Gender, Age and Social Stigma: The Coping strategy Choice on Mental Health and Attitudes Towards Help-seeking
BT  - Proceedings of the 2021 International Conference on Social Development and Media Communication (SDMC 2021)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 174
EP  - 179
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/assehr.k.220105.034
DO  - 10.2991/assehr.k.220105.034
ID  - Zhang2022
ER  -