Indiana Consortium For Mental Health
Services Research
Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

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Abstract

Reprint # 47: How Do People Come to Use Mental Health Services? Current Knowledge and Changing Perspectives

This chapter focuses on how people come to seek help from mental health services. Services can include: (1) the formal system, consisting of specialty mental health care and general medical care; (2) the lay system. including friends and family as well as self-help groups; (3) the folk system of religious advisors and alternative healers; and (4) the human-social service system of clergy, police, and teachers. The authors provide a review of the research on mental health-care use and describe and contrast the dominant theories of help-seeking behavior (the sociobehavi- oral model, the health belief model, and the theory of reasoned action). These models provide a profile of users of services; more recent dynamic approaches also focus on when care is received and develop models of illness careers. For example, the help-seeking decision-making model assumes that individuals pass through each stage laid out in the model. The authors propose an alternative., the network-episode model, which views help seeking as a social process managed by the social networks people have in the community, the treatment system, and social service agencies. The network-episode model in­corporates four components: the illness career, the social support system. the treatment system, and the social context. Students may want to investigate their own communities to discover what types of services are available for people who need help for their mental health problems.