The Help-seeking Dilemma Faced by College Students with Depressive Disorder: Self-stigma and Social Identity Threat

DOI

10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_149How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Stigma; Depressive disorder; Social identity threat; Help-seeking

Abstract

While the prevalence of depression among the general population has been increasing year by year, the proportion of depressed patients seeking professional psychological help is relatively low. Depressive patients not only suffer from the symptoms caused by diseases but also are subjected to stigmatization associated with depression including negative stereotypes and discrimination from society. The perceived threat of social identity induced by stigma towards depression may account for the reason why most depressive patients avoid seeking professional psychological help. The purpose of this study is to explore the role that social identity threat plays in the relationship between depression stigma and willingness to seek help in a case study of a patient with the depressive disorder through a process-tracing method for nearly two years with a profusion of in-depth interviews. The result suggests that the perceived threat of social identity caused by self-stigma may prompt depressed patients to adopt certain strategies to disguise the illness identity, and seeking counseling or psychotherapy is associated with the disclosure of their devalued social identity. This study provides new ideas for the field of study in stigma associated with depressive disorder and has practical significance for the improvement of social-psychological services in China.

Copyright

© 2022 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Yizhen Guo
PY  - 2022
DA  - 2022/12/30
TI  - The Help-seeking Dilemma Faced by College Students with Depressive Disorder: Self-stigma and Social Identity Threat
BT  - Proceedings of the 2022 5th International Conference on Humanities Education and Social Sciences (ICHESS 2022)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 1303
EP  - 1312
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_149
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-494069-89-3_149
ID  - Guo2022
ER  -