Introduction:
When having a mental health disorder, the individual's help-seeking behavior is essential to whether he could be properly treated or not. Help-seeking behavior is when a person seeks and asks for help from others by communicating with them. And the first step of treatment is asking for assistance and help. When a person does not actively seek help, it is usually extremely difficult to give it to him. Whether an individual has high or low help-seeking behavior is determined by many factors. Culture, for instance, could have an affect on individuals in many ways. Culture is the ways, beliefs, and institutions of a population that is passed down among generations. Thus, it is important to know in what way does culture affect a person’s help-seeking behavior. Some cultures have more influence than other cultures. One of the most dominant cultures is the culture of the Middle East. And due to the culture in the Middle East which encourages close family relationships and due to some existing stigmas in the society and culture, help-seeking behaviors among individuals in the Middle East is noticeably low.
Literature Review:
In one of the researches conducted, it was shown that in general, the attitudes of individuals in the Middle East towards help-seeking in regards to mental health disorders and issues is negative. Some barriers were found that were a cause of this negativity. Some of these barriers were economic and structural barriers to accessing mental healthcare. However, another barrier that was more related to culture is that most of those who did seek help, sought it from traditional healers and family members before seeking professional help, that is if they did at all. (Elshamy et al., 2023).
Another Study was conducted and the results showed that gender, nationality, and age did not have any impact on individuals' help-seeking behavior. However, the traditional family values in the culture of the Middle East did show an effect on a person's help-seeking behavior, especially for males. This was especially evident in cases where individuals blindly stuck to their traditional beliefs without attempting to adjust. (Andrade et al., 2022)
Analysis:
Multiple conclusions were made and found by the end of the research. To begin with what was found regarding the nature of the culture in the Middle East, one of the main aspects of the culture that were reflected on its individuals was the members' adherence to family values. People in the Middle East typically hold great value and regard for their family members and hold their family values at high status. They give great importance to their family and tend to share most of their life and what's important with them. These culturally influenced family values tend to in turn have an effect on people's attitudes towards mental health and their help-seeking behaviors. Firstly, this could be because the family values ask of individuals to take care of their family members and this typically makes individuals think that this requires them to be strong. And as it is generally stereotyped among cultures that having a mental health disorder, or any disorder, is considered “weak”, this makes individuals hesitant to seek help or admit that they may need it as this imply that they are “weak” because of both having to ask others for help and because this would mean they have a disorder. This could be especially seen with males as they are typically more required to take care of their family members than females. This could be seen because “in terms of family values, a statistically significant difference was found across genders, with males presenting higher adherence to traditional family values.”. (Andrade et al., 2022). In addition, stigmas in the society and the culture make an individual feel as a failure if he were to have a mental disorder. Some would view him as abnormal and would make it seem like it was his fault that he has a mental disorder and thus he was a failure, incapable of responsibility, and incompetent to take care of his family. “Instead of viewing mental illness as a condition that requires treatment, the community views it as a failure on the individual’s part to integrate into society, resulting in many families becoming socially marginalized from societies. Such views force individuals to hide their mental illness to avoid disgracing themselves and their families”. (Elshamy et al., 2023).
Another way in which the culture affects the individual's help-seeking behavior is related to the close family relationships that the culture encourages. When people with mental health problems seek help, they tend to look to take it from close family members. This could be a main cause of the culture's emphasis on close family connections. This is evident because “people suffering from mental health difficulties considered those closest to them as the frontline sources of support. Reasons for this mainly pointed towards … following the region’s deep-rooted collectivist culture”. (Elshamy et al., 2023).
It could be inferred that although the effects of the culture on the individual's behavior was evident, it wasn't directly causing those negative effects. Rather, it was the people's misguided inferences about the values of the culture that caused those effects and some of the stereotypes that also caused an effect.
Conclusion:
The focus of the study was to find any effects that the culture of the Middle East may have on its individuals' help-seeking behaviors. After analyzing the data from different sources, multiple conclusions were reached. The first result was that because of the importance the culture places on families and taking care of them, individuals tend to avoid admitting that they may need help in order to avoid being “weak” as some cultural stereotypes depict. In addition, due to stigmas in the society individuals are reluctant to seek help for mental health disorders as parts of the society views having a disorder a “failure” of some kind. Finally, in another way, the close family relationships encouraged by the culture in the Middle East influence people to seek help from close family members first before looking for other sources of help. And often no help is seeked from other sources. The results reached show that some actions need to be taken in order to raise awareness among the individuals about their help-seeking behavior. It is necessary to resolve the misunderstandings the individuals have regarding their culture in order to raise the positive behavior and the right actions they take in regards to mental health disorder.
In order to further understand the cultures effect on people's help-seeking behaviors, further studies could explore the way different religions in the Middle East influence the culture in the Middle East differently and how that in turn affect the peoples help-seeking behaviors and attitudes towards mental health disorders.
Resources:
Andrade, G., Bedewy, D., Elamin, A. B. A., Abdelmonem, K. Y. A., Teir, H. J., & Alqaderi, N. (2022, November 18). Attitudes towards mental health problems in a sample of United Arab Emirates’ residents - middle east current psychiatry. SpringerOpen. https://mecp.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s43045-022-00255-4
Elshamy, F., Hamadeh, A., Billings, J., & Alyafei, A. (2023, October 26). Mental illness and help-seeking behaviours among Middle Eastern cultures: A systematic review and meta-synthesis of qualitative data. PloS one. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10602270/
