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Background and Purpose: Suicide is the second leading cause of death for college students. While several studies have shown that less than a third of college students experiencing suicidal thoughts seek professional help, many studies have shown that students are more likely to seek help from their social support networks. Suicide prevention programs on college campuses depend on individuals in the school community to intervene; however, what factors influence whether an individual intervenes to help another student remains unclear. Attitudes about mental health treatment as well as help received from informal supports have been associated with help-seeking behavior. In the current study, we sought to determine whether stigma and prior history of seeking help from informal or academic supports would influence the likelihood of intervening.
Methods: Data was obtained from the Healthy Minds Study (2012; n= 23,763), an annual web-based survey of randomly selected college student. Stigma (personal and perceived) was assessed with six different items from the devaluation-discrimination scale. Prior history of help-seeking was measured by whether or not individuals previously sought help. Using multivariate logistic regression, we calculated Adjusted Odds Ratios (AOR, adjusting for demographics) for personal stigma, perceived stigma, informal supports, and academic supports and their relation to whether an individual would intervene.
Results: Important factors associated with intervening were observed. The majority of students (66%) reported that they would not intervene if someone was experiencing significant distress or suicidal thoughts. Those who did not intervene cited the following reasons: felt it was none of their business (60%), did not know what to do (37%), did not feel confident (26%), and 16% assumed someone else would do something. Seeking help from academic supports (r = .11) and informal supports (r= .18) were positively correlated with intervening, while personal stigma was negatively correlated with intervening (r= -.13); all correlations were significant (p< .001).
Students who sought help from informal supports were over two times more likely to intervene (AOR 2.1, p< .0001), and students who sought help from academic supports were one and a half times more likely to intervene (AOR 1.7, P< .001). While students reporting higher levels of perceived public stigma were more likely to intervene, students experiencing higher levels of personal stigma were less likely to intervene (AOR 1.2 and .68, respectively, p< .0001).
Conclusion and Implications: Our findings have implications for increasing service utilization through preventive psychoeducation and targeted interventions that consider the pivotal role of informal and academic supports. Targeted interventions need to consider equipping students as well as academic personnel with tools that not only provide resources for appropriate help (to give to students in distress). Such interventions need to address the continued high rates of personal stigma among college students. More so, it is imperative for suicide prevention programs that depend on training individuals as gate-keepers, to take into account the high rates of students feeling as if another student’s emotional distress is none of their business, as well as address students’ lack of self-confidence and feeling ill-equipped to intervene.