Abstract

Background: The purpose the study was to assess parent’s attitudes toward mental illness in children and is relationship with help seeking behaviours.

Method: This cross-sectional study was conducted in a pediatric psychiatric clinic of under affiliation of Tehran University of Medical Sciences in 2016-17. All children’s parents or guardians who referred for the first time to the clinics were the study population. Convenient Sampling was applied and 400 subjects were included by survey method. The data collection tool for this study included a form for demographic data, a questionnaire for assessing parents’ attitude toward the causes, behavioral demonstrations and treatment of mental disorders in children, and finally a checklist to determine help seeking behaviors. Descriptive and inferential statistics was applied with SPSS software version 16 for data analysis.

Results: 93.7% of parents had a good attitude toward mental illness in the three studied realms. 56.25% of parents referred to official sources of help. The results of this research showed that there was a significant difference between the mean scores of parents’ attitude (sum of the three areas) in terms of child’s gender, parents’ marital status, father’s job, father’s education, and mother’s education and there was a significant relationship between help seeking behavior of parents just with fathers’ education level (P<0.05).

Conclusion: The results showed that parents had a good attitude toward their children’s mental disorders However, it should not be overlooked that nearly half of parents were still referring to unofficial sources of assistance.

Keywords: Help seeking; Mental disorder; Attitude; Children