Overcoming Stigma as a Barrier to Children's Mental Health Care: The Role of Empowerment and Mental Health Literacy

The authors use the gateway provider model to examine how parents'/guardians' willingness to seek mental health care for their children is impacted by experiences of affiliate stigma and label avoidance. Although efforts to understand and reduce the detrimental influence of stigma on mental illness are growing, research on possible facilitators to combat stigma and promote treatment seeking is sorely lacking. To address this gap, a cross-sectional survey (N = 89) of young adults aged 18-30, who had been diagnosed with mental illness in childhood, examines the ways in which affiliate stigma, label avoidance, mental health literacy (MHL), and family empowerment (FE) interact to predict parents'/guardians' willingness to seek mental health care for their children. Moderation hypotheses are tested using Hayes' process macro to perform multiple regression analyses involving a two-way interaction among continuous variables. As predicted, the relationship between label avoidance and care seeking is negative and significant at average and high levels of affiliate stigma. Conversely, the relationship between family empowerment and care seeking is positive and significant at low and average levels of MHL. MHL and FE act as the facilitators to care seeking; the relationship between label avoidance and care seeking is negative and significant at low levels of MHL, and the relationship between affiliate stigma and care seeking is negative and significant at low and average levels of FE. Overall, these results indicate that MHL and FE have the potential to buffer the detrimental effects of stigma on care seeking for children's mental healthcare.