title: Understanding Help-Seeking Behavior in Depression: A Qualitative Synthesis of Patients' Experiences.
abstract: Despite decades of evidence-based interventions, depression remains a great challenge for public health due to enormous treatment gap and lag which, at least partially, result from low professional help-seeking by people suffering from depressive symptoms. In this article, we aim to gain a better understanding of help-seeking behavior in depression, and how to intervene effectively decreasing treatment gap and delay by using a meta-ethnography approach-an interpretive technique to systematically synthesize qualitative data. It integrates views and experiences of 474 individuals with depression across 20 papers. Findings suggest several interrelated major concepts-help-seeking as a threat to identity, social networks as a conflict or support, and alternative coping strategies as the main factor for treatment delay-as well as multiple relational, structural, attitudinal, cognitive, culture-specific, or gender-specific barriers. A model of help-seeking as a threat to identity is developed and discussed in the context of existing research.
authors.affiliation: University of Granada, Granada, Spain sigita.doblyte@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Sigita
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Doblyte
authors.affiliation: University of Granada, Granada, Spain.
authors.forename: Eladio
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Jiménez-Mejías
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology*; D000066505:Help-Seeking Behavior; D006801:Humans; D010342:Patient Acceptance of Health Care / Q000523:psychology*; D028723:Personhood; D036301:Qualitative Research; D012944:Social Support
keywords: Europe; North America; depression; help-seeking; illness identity; meta-ethnography; qualitative; qualitative synthesis