Towards a model of professional help-seeking for women's perinatal mood and anxiety disorders: The application of the information-processing model of help-seeking decisions

Abstract

Perinatal mood and anxiety disorders (PMAD) affect 15% to 21% of pregnant and postpartum women, having a pervasive effect on women, their children and the wide family system (Byrnes, 2018). Despite effective treatments are available for PMAD, few women proactively seek professional assistance (Button et al., 2017). Existing research on the topic has been mainly focused on the barriers to the help-seeking process (Rouhi et al., 2019), with a scarcity of studies exploring the steps of the women’s decision-making. In the mental health context, help-seeking may be defined as an “an adaptive coping process that is the attempt to obtain external assistance to deal with a mental health concern” (p. 180, Rickwood and Thomas, 2012). The help-seeking process is an active process in which the individual moves from the personal (recognition/awareness of their emotional problems) to the interpersonal domain (willingness to and disclosing of their needs to others) (Cornally and McCarthy, 2011).