Help-Seeking Behavior

Abstract

Help-seeking behavior is a form of social behavior: the active, planned process of drawing on other people or services to cope with a problem one cannot, or would rather not, resolve alone. The field turns on a single tension—the help that would solve a problem is often the help a person is least willing to request. This article develops the main threads: the reframing of help-seeking as an adaptive skill rather than dependence; the cost-benefit decision weighing the value of assistance against its threat to self-esteem and autonomy; the barriers and facilitators governing whether young people seek help for mental-health problems; the self-stigma that suppresses it; and the staged process from first awareness of a problem to reaching a source. A worked example and three interactive demonstrations make each manipulable.

Keywords: help-seeking, social behavior, self-stigma, barriers, mental-health literacy

Asking for help is one of the most ordinary moves in social life and one of the most psychologically loaded. A student who does not understand a problem, an adult with a worsening mood, a patient noticing a symptom: in each case the useful next step is to turn to someone who knows more or can do more. Yet people routinely do not take that step, and the reasons are rarely ignorance of where help lies. They decline because asking can feel like an admission of incompetence, because the problem does not yet feel serious enough, because they prefer to manage alone, or because the stigma attached to a particular kind of help—psychological help above all—outweighs its expected benefit.

What cognitive and behavioural science brings to the topic is a shift from treating help-seeking as a personality trait a person simply has or lacks to treating it as a decision and a process—a sequence of appraisals and actions that can be described, measured, and in places intervened upon. The sections below take these in turn: the reconception of help-seeking as skilled problem-solving, the cost-benefit calculus behind the decision, the barriers and facilitators that tilt it, the stigma that suppresses it, its developmental and academic forms, and the staged process through which it unfolds—after first placing help-seeking within the broader category of social behavior under which it is classified.

What Help-Seeking Behavior Is

Help-seeking behavior, in the sense the behavioural sciences study it, is the deliberate effort to obtain assistance—information, advice, emotional support, or practical aid—from other people or from formal services, in response to a problem the person cannot readily resolve alone. A concept analysis of the term identifies its recurring attributes: it is a problem-focused, planned action, undertaken in response to a perceived difficulty, that involves interpersonal interaction with a chosen source of help (Cornally & McCarthy, 2011). On this account help-seeking is not a passive receipt of aid but an active behavior the person initiates, which is what makes it a decision and a process rather than an event that merely happens to someone.

Two distinctions organise the field. The first is who or what is approached: informal sources such as family and friends, and formal sources such as teachers, physicians, or mental-health professionals—a difference that matters because the barriers to each are different. The second, due to Sharon Nelson-Le Gall, is what kind of help is sought: instrumental (or adaptive) help-seeking asks for the minimum assistance needed to solve the problem oneself and so serves learning and autonomy, whereas executive (or dependency) help-seeking asks others to take over the task and remove the effort (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981). The distinction reframes a behavior once read as weakness into one that, in its instrumental form, is a hallmark of a competent, self-regulating problem-solver.

In the Medical Subject Headings vocabulary, Help-Seeking Behavior is a descriptor defined as the act or behaviour of actively seeking help or treatment, filed under Social Behavior. The placement is apt: help-seeking is social through and through, defined entirely by the person's turning toward another party to meet a need, and shaped by the relationship between them. The remainder of this article takes the mechanisms of help-seeking in turn—the decision, the barriers and facilitators, the stigma, its developmental and academic forms, and the staged process—and connects each to the cognition and motivation it requires.

Perspectives on Help-Seeking

The study of help-seeking is organised less by one grand theory than by a set of complementary perspectives, each tied to a distinct question. A developmental-educational perspective asked whether seeking help is a weakness or a skill, and answered that its instrumental form is adaptive problem-solving. A social-psychological perspective asked why people able to benefit from help so often decline it, and answered in terms of the threat help poses to self-esteem and autonomy. A public-health perspective asked what keeps young people from seeking help for mental-health problems, and catalogued the barriers and facilitators. A clinical-stigma perspective asked how the stigma of a problem and of help itself suppresses help-seeking, and measured the association. A process perspective asked how help-seeking actually unfolds over time, and described it as a sequence of stages. These are layers rather than rivals: a single instance of not asking for help may reflect a low expected benefit, a high esteem cost, a stigma, and an early process stage all at once. Table 1 summarises them, and the sections that follow develop each in turn.

Figure 1

The Help-Seeking Decision and Its Influences

Table 1

Perspectives on Help-Seeking Behavior

The Decision to Seek Help

The most durable insight of the social psychology of help-seeking is that the useful help is often the costly help. Arie Nadler's programme reframed the recipient's side of helping relations around a conflict between two motives: the instrumental benefit of the aid, and the threat that receiving it poses to the recipient's self-esteem, sense of competence, and autonomy (Nadler, 2015). Help carries an implicit message—that the recipient could not manage alone—and the more the help bears on a domain central to the person's self-definition, and the more it comes from a similar other against whom one might compare, the more threatening it becomes. The paradox that follows is central to the field: the people and situations for which help would do the most good are often exactly those in which the esteem cost of asking is highest.

The same logic appears in organisations. Fiona Lee found that employees high in the need for power were markedly less willing to seek help, because asking signals dependence and a loss of status, and that the willingness to seek help fell as the public visibility of the request and its potential cost to one's image rose (Lee, 1997). Read as a decision, help-seeking is the outcome of weighing the expected benefit of the assistance against these costs—esteem, autonomy, effort, and the risk to one's standing—and asking only when the balance is favourable. Demo 1 lets the reader set the value of the help, its probability of solving the problem, and the esteem and effort costs, and read off whether the decision tips toward seeking help.

Barriers and Facilitators

For mental-health problems in particular, and especially among adolescents and young adults, researchers have mapped the specific influences that tilt the help-seeking decision. A systematic review by Amelia Gulliver and colleagues identified the most consistently reported barriers to young people's mental-health help-seeking as stigma and embarrassment, problems recognising symptoms (poor mental-health literacy), and a strong preference for self-reliance; the most consistently reported facilitators were positive past experiences of help, social encouragement from others, and the perception that a problem was serious (Gulliver et al., 2010). A later systematic review reached a convergent picture and added structural barriers—cost, availability, and not knowing where to go—alongside the attitudinal ones (Aguirre Velasco et al., 2020).

The practical importance of this catalogue is that barriers and facilitators are not fixed traits but modifiable targets. Mental-health literacy can be taught, stigma can be reduced, and structural access can be improved, each shifting the balance toward help-seeking without changing anything about the person's underlying problem. The influences also combine rather than acting singly: a young person may hold a serious problem, recognise it clearly, and still not seek help if self-reliance and anticipated stigma together outweigh the encouragement available to them. Demo 2 represents the decision as a tug-of-war between weighted barriers and facilitators and shows how the net balance maps onto a probability of seeking help.

Stigma and the Help-Seeking Gap

Of all the barriers, stigma is the most studied, because it is both powerful and specific to help itself. David Vogel and colleagues distinguished the public stigma attached to having a mental-health problem from the self-stigma of seeking help—the reduction in a person's own self-regard that they anticipate simply from the act of consulting a professional—and showed that this self-stigma could be measured reliably and predicted attitudes toward and intentions to seek psychological help over and above public stigma (Vogel, Wade & Haake, 2006). The construct matters because it locates part of the deterrent inside the person: even where services are available and public attitudes are tolerant, the privately anticipated hit to self-esteem can be enough to keep someone from asking.

The association has since been quantified. A systematic review and meta-analysis by Nina Schnyder and colleagues pooled studies relating mental-health stigma to active help-seeking and found that greater stigma—and lower mental-health literacy—was reliably associated with lower active help-seeking, though the effect sizes were small (Schnyder et al., 2017). The smallness matters as much as the direction: stigma is a genuine and consistent suppressant, but it is one influence among several rather than the whole story, which is why interventions that target stigma alone produce real but limited gains. Demo 3 lets the reader vary a self-stigma level and read off the predicted help-seeking intention along a modest negative association like the one the meta-analysis reports.

Developmental and Academic Help-Seeking

In the classroom, help-seeking is a learning strategy, and its study grew out of exactly the reframing Nelson-Le Gall proposed. Stuart Karabenick and John Knapp showed that the relationship between needing academic assistance and actually seeking it is not straightforward: among students, a greater need for help was associated with a lower likelihood of seeking it through formal channels, precisely because the threat to self-worth rises with the admission of need—the same esteem dynamic the social-psychological perspective describes, now operating in school (Karabenick & Knapp, 1988). Adaptive learners resolve this tension by seeking instrumental help: enough to overcome the obstacle and continue working independently.

Allison Ryan and Paul Pintrich showed that whether adolescents ask for help in their mathematics classes is governed by motivation and social concerns rather than by ability alone. Students who felt more cognitively and socially competent were more likely to seek help when they needed it, while those who worried about what asking would reveal to teachers and peers were more likely to avoid it, even at a cost to their learning (Ryan & Pintrich, 1997). The academic case is instructive for the whole topic because it shows the two faces of help-seeking in the same setting: a skill that supports self-regulated learning when instrumental, and a behavior suppressed by the very self-evaluative concerns that make it feel risky.

The Process and Stages of Help-Seeking

Help-seeking is not a single choice but a sequence, and describing that sequence is the contribution of the process perspective. Debra Rickwood and colleagues characterised help-seeking for mental-health problems as a progression: from becoming aware of a problem and appraising it as warranting help, to being able and willing to express the need and disclose it to another, to actually having sources of help available and reaching them (Rickwood et al., 2005). Each stage is a potential point of failure: a person may never recognise the problem, recognise it but be unable to put it into words, be willing to disclose but have nowhere to turn, so that an intervention aimed at the wrong stage misses.

Mapping the process onto the barriers makes the picture actionable. A systematic review by Julia Radez and colleagues of why children and adolescents do and do not seek professional help for mental-health problems found that the reasons cluster by stage—limited mental-health literacy and problem recognition early, stigma and a preference for self-reliance in the middle, and structural issues of access and trust in formal services late—so that the dominant barrier shifts as a young person moves through the sequence (Radez et al., 2021). The process view thereby reconciles the other perspectives: the decision, its costs, the barriers, and the stigma each dominate at a different point along the path from first noticing a problem to finally obtaining help.

Worked Example

The mechanisms become concrete in three small exercises, each matching one of the demonstrations. The numbers below are illustrative—they capture the qualitative shape of the published findings rather than reproducing any single reported statistic.

The help-seeking decision (expected utility). Suppose a student weighs whether to ask for help on a hard assignment. The help would be worth B = 10 units if it worked, and it would resolve the problem with probability p = 0.7, so its expected benefit is B × p = 10 × 0.7 = 7. Against this stand the costs: an esteem cost C​_esteem = 4 (the admission of not managing alone) and an effort cost C​_effort = 1. The net value of seeking help is 7 − 4 − 1 = +2, which is positive, so the student asks. Raise the esteem cost to 7—a domain central to the student's self-definition, or a request made publicly—and the net value falls to 7 − 7 − 1 = −1, and the same student, facing the same problem with the same help available, now declines. Demo 1 lets the reader move these quantities and watch the decision flip.

Barriers versus facilitators (a net balance). Represent the influences as weighted contributions to a single balance z, with facilitators positive and barriers negative. Suppose the facilitators present are social encouragement (+1.2) and a prior positive experience (+0.8), and the barriers are stigma (−1.5) and a preference for self-reliance (−1.0). The net balance is z = 1.2 + 0.8 − 1.5 − 1.0 = −0.5. Converting the balance to a probability with the logistic function gives 1 / (1 + e^−z) = 1 / (1 + e^0.5) = 0.38: despite real facilitators, the net tilt toward the barriers leaves this young person more likely than not to stay silent. Removing the stigma barrier alone lifts z to +1.0 and the probability to 0.73. Demo 2 lets the reader toggle each influence and read off the resulting probability.

Stigma and help-seeking (a modest association). The meta-analytic relationship between self-stigma and help-seeking intention is negative but small. Model help-seeking intention on a 0–100 scale as H = 70 − 6 × s, where s is a self-stigma level from 0 to 5. At low stigma (s = 1) the predicted intention is 70 − 6 = 64; at high stigma (s = 5) it is 70 − 30 = 40. The slope is real and consistent in direction, but moving across the whole stigma range shifts intention by 24 points on a 100-point scale—a reminder that stigma is one meaningful influence, not a switch. Demo 3 lets the reader slide the stigma level and watch the predicted intention fall along this line.

Discussion

Read across its perspectives, the science of help-seeking tells a coherent story about a behavior that is useful, often needed, and systematically under-produced. The developmental-educational perspective established that seeking help, in its instrumental form, is not dependence but a skill of the self-regulating problem-solver (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981; Karabenick & Knapp, 1988; Ryan & Pintrich, 1997). The social-psychological perspective explained why it is nonetheless under-produced: help threatens self-esteem and autonomy, so the people and problems that would benefit most are often those for which the esteem cost of asking is highest (Nadler, 2015; Lee, 1997). The public-health and clinical perspectives made the suppressants concrete—stigma, poor literacy, and a preference for self-reliance—and showed that stigma's association with lower help-seeking, while reliable, is modest rather than overwhelming (Gulliver et al., 2010; Vogel, Wade & Haake, 2006; Schnyder et al., 2017).

The constructive lesson follows from taking the process seriously. Because help-seeking unfolds as a sequence of appraisals and actions, and because the dominant barrier shifts along that sequence, interventions work best when matched to the stage a person is at: mental-health literacy and problem-recognition programmes early, stigma reduction and disclosure support in the middle, and accessible, trustworthy services at the end (Rickwood et al., 2005; Radez et al., 2021). The honest summary is that help-seeking is best understood not as a trait some people have and others lack, but as a decision and a process that can be made easier—by lowering its costs, teaching the skill of asking instrumentally, and ensuring that when a person finally does turn toward help, a source is there to meet them.

Current Directions

The most active front follows help-seeking into the settings where young people now spend their time. Systematic reviews over the last decade have consolidated the barriers-and-facilitators picture and turned it toward intervention, asking not only what stops young people seeking help but what demonstrably increases it—school-based mental-health literacy programmes, stigma-reduction campaigns, and low-threshold digital services that lower the esteem and access costs of a first approach (Aguirre Velasco et al., 2020). A second front refines the process model with large qualitative-and-quantitative syntheses that locate each barrier at the stage it operates, so that an intervention can be aimed where a given population actually stalls rather than at help-seeking in general (Radez et al., 2021). A third keeps the measurement of stigma central, using the meta-analytic estimate of its modest effect to set realistic expectations for what stigma-focused programmes alone can achieve and to argue for combining them with literacy and access reforms (Schnyder et al., 2017). The common thread is a move from cataloguing why people do not ask toward designing the conditions under which they will.

Common Misconceptions

Seeking help is a sign of weakness or dependence.

Instrumental help-seeking—asking for just enough assistance to solve a problem oneself—is an adaptive problem-solving skill characteristic of competent, self-regulating learners, not a failure of independence. The dependence framing confuses it with executive help-seeking, which offloads the whole task (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981).

People who need help most are the ones most likely to ask for it.

Often the reverse. Because help threatens self-esteem and autonomy, greater need can be associated with lower help-seeking, and able or power-motivated people can be the most reluctant to ask (Karabenick & Knapp, 1988; Lee, 1997).

Reducing stigma will solve the help-seeking gap.

Stigma is a reliable suppressant of help-seeking, but its effect is modest, and it is one influence among several. Meta-analytic estimates imply that stigma-reduction alone produces real but limited gains, and must be combined with improving mental-health literacy and access (Schnyder et al., 2017).

Not seeking help just means a person does not know where to go.

Lack of knowledge is only one barrier, and often not the decisive one. Attitudinal barriers—stigma, embarrassment, and a preference for self-reliance—are reported at least as consistently as structural ones, so simply advertising services does not by itself close the gap (Gulliver et al., 2010).

Glossary

Barrier.

An influence that lowers the likelihood of seeking help, such as stigma, poor mental-health literacy, a preference for self-reliance, or the cost and inaccessibility of services.

Decision-making.

The weighing of options and their consequences; in help-seeking, the comparison of the expected benefit of assistance against its esteem, autonomy, effort, and stigma costs.

Executive help-seeking.

Seeking help in order to have someone else take over and complete the task, removing the effort; contrasted with instrumental help-seeking. Also termed dependency help-seeking.

Facilitator.

An influence that raises the likelihood of seeking help, such as a prior positive experience of help, encouragement from others, or the perception that a problem is serious enough to warrant it.

Formal help.

Assistance obtained from professionals or services—teachers, physicians, counsellors, mental-health practitioners—as distinct from informal help from family and friends.

Help-seeking behavior.

The active, planned process of obtaining assistance from other people or formal services in response to a perceived problem; the subject of this article and a MeSH descriptor filed under social behavior.

Informal help.

Assistance sought from a person's own social network—family, friends, peers—rather than from professionals or formal services; often the first source young people approach.

Instrumental help-seeking.

Asking for the minimum assistance needed to solve a problem oneself, so that help serves learning and continued independence; the adaptive form identified by Nelson-Le Gall.

Mental-health literacy.

The knowledge and beliefs that help a person recognise, manage, or prevent mental-health problems, including awareness of symptoms and of where and how to seek help. Low literacy is a recurrent early barrier.

Problem appraisal.

The judgement that a difficulty exists and is serious enough to warrant help; the first stage of the help-seeking process and a precondition for the decision that follows.

Public stigma.

The negative attitudes a community holds toward people with a mental-health problem or who seek help for one; distinguished from self-stigma, which is the internalised version a person applies to themselves.

Self-reliance.

The disposition to handle one's own problems without turning to others; a consistently reported barrier to help-seeking, especially for mental-health problems in young people.

Self-stigma of seeking help.

The reduction in a person's own self-regard that they anticipate simply from the act of seeking professional help; a measurable predictor of attitudes toward and intentions to seek psychological help.

Social behavior.

Action directed at or shaped by other members of one's species; the MeSH parent category under which help-seeking is filed, since it is defined by the person's turning toward another party.

Key Researchers

Sharon Nelson-Le Gall

(Professor Emerita of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh). Reframed help-seeking as an adaptive, instrumental problem-solving skill in children rather than a sign of dependence, founding the developmental study of the behavior. Faculty Page

Amelia Gulliver

(Australian National University, Centre for Mental Health Research). Systematically reviewed the barriers and facilitators to mental-health help-seeking in young people, producing the catalogue that organises much of the current intervention research. ORCID · Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Stuart A. Karabenick

(1940–2020) (University of Michigan, School of Education). A leading figure in the study of academic help-seeking and achievement motivation, who showed that need for help and actually seeking it can be inversely related. Faculty Page

Arie Nadler

(Professor Emeritus of Psychology, Tel Aviv University). Pioneered the social-psychological study of the recipient's side of helping relations, showing how help threatens self-esteem and autonomy and so is often declined. Faculty Page

Debra J. Rickwood

(University of Canberra; headspace National Youth Mental Health Foundation). Developed the staged process model of young people's mental-health help-seeking, from problem awareness through willingness to disclose to reaching a source. ORCID · Faculty Page

Allison M. Ryan

(University of Michigan, Marsal Family School of Education). Showed that adolescents' academic help-seeking is governed by motivation and social-evaluative concerns rather than by ability alone. Google Scholar · Faculty Page

David L. Vogel

(Iowa State University, Department of Psychology). Distinguished the self-stigma of seeking help from public stigma and developed the measure showing that self-stigma predicts attitudes toward and intentions to seek psychological help. Google Scholar · Faculty Page

Frequently Asked Questions

What is help-seeking behavior in psychology?

Help-seeking behavior is the active, planned process of obtaining assistance—information, advice, emotional support, or practical aid—from other people or formal services in response to a problem a person cannot readily resolve alone. It is treated as a decision and a process rather than a fixed personality trait (Cornally & McCarthy, 2011).

Is asking for help a sign of weakness?

No. Instrumental help-seeking—asking for just enough assistance to solve a problem oneself—is an adaptive problem-solving skill typical of competent, self-regulating learners. Only executive or dependency help-seeking, which hands the whole task to someone else, fits the weakness framing (Nelson-Le Gall, 1981).

Why do people who need help often avoid asking for it?

Because help can threaten self-esteem and autonomy by implying that the person cannot manage alone. The threat is greatest in domains central to the person's self-definition, so greater need is sometimes associated with lower help-seeking, and able or status-conscious people can be especially reluctant (Nadler, 2015; Lee, 1997).

What stops young people from seeking help for mental-health problems?

The most consistently reported barriers are stigma and embarrassment, difficulty recognising symptoms, and a preference for self-reliance, alongside structural issues such as cost and not knowing where to go. Positive past experiences and encouragement from others are the main facilitators (Gulliver et al., 2010).

What is the self-stigma of seeking help?

It is the reduction in a person's own self-regard that they anticipate simply from the act of consulting a professional, distinct from the public stigma attached to having a problem. Self-stigma can be measured reliably and predicts attitudes toward and intentions to seek psychological help (Vogel, Wade & Haake, 2006).

Does stigma actually reduce help-seeking?

Yes, but modestly. A meta-analysis found that greater mental-health stigma and lower mental-health literacy are reliably associated with lower active help-seeking, though the effect sizes are small—stigma is one genuine influence among several rather than the whole explanation (Schnyder et al., 2017).

Does help-seeking happen in stages?

It can be described as a sequence: becoming aware of a problem and appraising it as warranting help, being able and willing to express and disclose the need, and finally reaching an available source. Each stage is a possible point of failure, and the dominant barrier shifts along the sequence (Rickwood et al., 2005; Radez et al., 2021).

How can help-seeking be encouraged?

By matching interventions to the stage at which people stall: teaching mental-health literacy and problem recognition early, reducing stigma and supporting disclosure in the middle, and ensuring accessible, trustworthy services at the end. Because barriers combine and shift, no single measure closes the gap alone (Aguirre Velasco et al., 2020).

References

Aguirre Velasco, A., Cruz, I. S. S., Billings, J., Jimenez, M., & Rowe, S. (2020). What are the barriers, facilitators and interventions targeting help-seeking behaviours for common mental health problems in adolescents? A systematic review. BMC Psychiatry, 20, 293. https://doi.org/10.1186/s12888-020-02659-0

Cornally, N., & McCarthy, G. (2011). Help-seeking behaviour: A concept analysis. International Journal of Nursing Practice, 17(3), 280–288. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1440-172X.2011.01936.x

Gulliver, A., Griffiths, K. M., & Christensen, H. (2010). Perceived barriers and facilitators to mental health help-seeking in young people: A systematic review. BMC Psychiatry, 10, 113. https://doi.org/10.1186/1471-244X-10-113

Karabenick, S. A., & Knapp, J. R. (1988). Help seeking and the need for academic assistance. Journal of Educational Psychology, 80(3), 406–408. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.80.3.406

Lee, F. (1997). When the going gets tough, do the tough ask for help? Help seeking and power motivation in organizations. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 72(3), 336–363. https://doi.org/10.1006/obhd.1997.2746

Nadler, A. (2015). The other side of helping: Seeking and receiving help. In D. A. Schroeder & W. G. Graziano (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of prosocial behavior (pp. 307–328). Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780195399813.013.004

Nelson-Le Gall, S. (1981). Help-seeking: An understudied problem-solving skill in children. Developmental Review, 1(3), 224–246. https://doi.org/10.1016/0273-2297(81)90019-8

Radez, J., Reardon, T., Creswell, C., Lawrence, P. J., Evdoka-Burton, G., & Waite, P. (2021). Why do children and adolescents (not) seek and access professional help for their mental health problems? A systematic review of quantitative and qualitative studies. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 30(2), 183–211. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-019-01469-4

Rickwood, D., Deane, F. P., Wilson, C. J., & Ciarrochi, J. (2005). Young people's help-seeking for mental health problems. Australian e-Journal for the Advancement of Mental Health, 4(3), 218–251. https://doi.org/10.5172/jamh.4.3.218

Ryan, A. M., & Pintrich, P. R. (1997). “Should I ask for help?” The role of motivation and attitudes in adolescents' help seeking in math class. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(2), 329–341. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0663.89.2.329

Schnyder, N., Panczak, R., Groth, N., & Schultze-Lutter, F. (2017). Association between mental health-related stigma and active help-seeking: Systematic review and meta-analysis. British Journal of Psychiatry, 210(4), 261–268. https://doi.org/10.1192/bjp.bp.116.189464

Vogel, D. L., Wade, N. G., & Haake, S. (2006). Measuring the self-stigma associated with seeking psychological help. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 53(3), 325–337. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.53.3.325