How Symptom Manifestations Affect Help Seeking for Mental Health Problems Among Chinese Americans

Abstract

This study aims to examine how help-seeking behaviors of Chinese Americans are associated with the types of mental disorder, the tendency to somatize symptoms, social disruptiveness of symptoms, and comorbidity. Based on data from the Chinese American Psychiatric Epidemiological Study, we examined 246 Chinese Americans with a diagnosable major depressive disorder, anxiety disorder, or somatoform disorder, using hierarchical logistic regression analyses. Compared with respondents with somatoform disorder, those with anxiety or depressive disorder were 94% and 87% less likely to seek professional help. The tendency to somatize distress is positively related to soliciting help, especially medical help. Social disruptiveness had a very potent positive association with help seeking whereas comorbidity is nonsignificant when the symptom severity is controlled. The overall picture indicates that somatic expression of distress is a major impetus to help seeking, which happens to concur with the cultural conceptualization and subjective embodied experience of mental disorders among Chinese.