ISSN: 2161-0711

Journal of Community Medicine & Health Education
Open Access

Our Group organises 3000+ Global Conferenceseries Events every year across USA, Europe & Asia with support from 1000 more scientific Societies and Publishes 700+ Open Access Journals which contains over 50000 eminent personalities, reputed scientists as editorial board members.

Open Access Journals gaining more Readers and Citations
700 Journals and 15,000,000 Readers Each Journal is getting 25,000+ Readers

This Readership is 10 times more when compared to other Subscription Journals (Source: Google Analytics)

Research Article

Factors Promoting Use of Mental Health Services in a Rural Area of Australia

David Pierce* and Charlotte Brewer

Rural Health Academic Centre, University of Melbourne, Sydney, Australia

*Corresponding Author:
David Pierce
Rural Health Academic Centre
University of Melbourne, Sydney, Australia
E-mail: d.pierce@unimelb.edu.au

Received date: November 17, 2012; Accepted date: December 17, 2012; Published date: December 19, 2012

Citation: Pierce D, Brewer C (2012) Factors Promoting Use of Mental Health Services in a Rural Area of Australia. J Community Med Health Educ 2:190. doi: 10.4172/2161-0711.1000190

Copyright: © 2012 Pierce D, et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Abstract

This paper reports research which identified a number of mental health help-seeking responses in a rural region of Australia. It describes the characteristics of services and of individual health professionals, as well as some Australian government initiatives that may promote help seeking behaviours. Focus group and individual interviews were undertaken. Participants included those who had personally experienced mental ill health, family and professional careers of individuals with mental ill health and individuals from rural culturally and linguistically diverse (CALD) communities. The researchers found that while many previously reported factors, such as stigma, limited confidentiality, cost factors, and previous negative experiences with mental health care continue to inhibit help-seeking, a number of responses and initiatives may actively promote help-seeking behaviours. These include: mental health literacy; targeted government schemes; accessible information; continuity of care and affordable services. The paper concludes that promoting these help-seeking enablers may support more desirable outcomes for those experiencing mental-ill healths in rural areas of Australia.

Keywords

Top