Teens’ Silent Struggle with Mental Health Issues

According to a study, less than one percent of adolescents in middle-income countries, including India, have sought professional help for mental health problems, while 28 to 50 percent of them face high levels of these problems.
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The study also found that adolescents rely heavily on informal sources of help to seek support in many countries, particularly in low-income countries.

The researchers found that 0.6 to 0.9 percent of girls and 0.9 to 1.2 percent of boys in the middle-income countries they studied – India, Vietnam and China – sought professional help.

The study, conducted by the University of Turku in Finland, involved more than 13,000 adolescents aged 13 to 15 in eight Asian and European countries who responded to surveys between 2011 and 2017.

Overall, girls were more likely than boys to seek help for mental health problems.

In high-income countries, researchers found that more adolescents sought formal help: 6 to 7 percent in Greece, Israel and Japan, and 21 to 25 percent in Norway and Finland.

The results were published in the journal European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

The researchers also asked participants about ways to seek support and found that informal sources of help are widely used among adolescents and are the main sources of help in many countries, particularly low-income countries.

Among adolescents who sought help, about 90% sought informal help across all Asian countries, with the proportion ranging from nearly 92% (India) to 96% (China) for girls and from nearly 88% (India) to 96% (China) for boys, the authors found. In addition, in India, more boys sought help from teachers than girls.

“Adolescents can get help from informal sources such as friends, teachers and family members, or from formal sources such as school nurses, psychologists and counsellors for professional assistance. Where they seek help depends on, for example, the availability of services, the cultural context and the stigma associated with mental illness,” said Yuko Mori, lead author of the study and a doctoral researcher at the University of Turku.

According to André Sourander, professor at the University of Turku and leader of the Eurasian Children’s Mental Health Study (EACMHS), of which this research was a part, the widely used informal sources of help, particularly in low-income countries, underscore a global need for mental health awareness and literacy programs.
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“Cross-cultural studies of adolescent mental health, such as this one, are important because almost all research on mental health comes from high-income Western countries. There is a huge knowledge gap because most research involves less than 10% of the adolescent population,” Sourander said.
PTI