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Parental attitude toward children’s mental disorders and its relationship with help seeking behaviors

  • Hossein Ebrahimi , Mohammad Reza Movaghari , Milad Bazghaleh EMAIL logo , Nasim Shirmohammadi and Reza Mohammadpourhodki
Published/Copyright: August 21, 2019

Abstract

Background

The purpose of the study was to assess parent’s attitudes toward mental illness in children and its relationship with help seeking behaviors.

Method

This cross-sectional study was conducted in a pediatric psychiatric clinic of under affiliation of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2016–2017. All children’s parents or guardians who referred for the first time to the clinics were the study population. Convenient sampling was applied and 400 subjects were included by survey method. The data collection tool for this study included a form for demographic data, a questionnaire for assessing parents’ attitude toward the causes, behavioral demonstrations and treatment of mental disorders in children, and finally a checklist to determine help seeking behaviors. Descriptive and inferential statistics was applied with SPSS software version 16 for data analysis.

Results

Of the parents, 93.7% had a good attitude toward mental illness in the three studied realms. Of the parents, 56.25% referred to official sources of help. The results of this research showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of parents’ attitude (sum of the three areas) in terms of child’s gender, parents’ marital status, father’s job, father’s education, and mother’s education and there was a significant relationship between help seeking behavior of parents just with fathers’ education level (p<0.05).

Conclusions

The results showed that parents had a good attitude toward their children’s mental disorders. However, it should not be overlooked that nearly half of the parents were still referring to unofficial sources of assistance.

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the adolescents and families who participated in the research.

  1. Authors’ contributions: All authors contributed to the conception and design of the study, an acquisition of data and to the analysis and interpretation of data. All authors were involved in critically revising the article for important intellectual content and gave final approval of the version to be published. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

  2. Research funding: None declared.

  3. Employment or leadership: None declared.

  4. Honorarium: None declared.

  5. Conflict of Interest: The authors declare that they have no competing interest.

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Received: 2018-12-26
Accepted: 2019-03-09
Published Online: 2019-08-21

© 2019 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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