‘Sharing things with people that I don’t even know’: help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men in Philadelphia

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Psychological distress is common in survivors of traumatic injury, yet across United States’ trauma systems, it is rare that standard injury care integrates psychological evaluation and professional mental healthcare. The purpose of this study was to explore help-seeking for psychological symptoms in injured Black men living in Philadelphia.

Design: A subset of a cohort of 551 injured Black men admitted to a Trauma Center in Philadelphia participated in qualitative interviews that explored their perceptions of psychological symptoms after injury and the factors that guided their decision to seek professional mental health help. Data from 32 participants were analyzed for narrative and thematic content.

Results: Three overarching themes emerged: (1) facilitators of help-seeking, (2) barriers to help-seeking, and (3) factors underlying the decision not to consider professional help. Five participants felt that their injury-related psychological distress was severe enough to merit professional help despite any perceived barriers. Seventeen participants identified systemic and interpersonal obstacles to professional help that prevented them from seeking this kind of care. These included: financial constraints, limited access to mental healthcare services, and fear of the judgments of mental healthcare professionals. Ten participants would not consider professional help; these men perceived a lack of need and sufficiency in their existing social support networks.

Conclusions: Research is needed to inform or identify interventions that diminish the impact of barriers to care, and identify from whom, where, and how professional mental health help might be more effectively offered to injured Black men in recovery environments like Philadelphia.

KEYWORDS:

• Help-seeking
• urban health
• mental health
• mental health services
• trauma
• injuries
• Black men
• Philadelphia

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Andrew Robinson and Tara Fernandez for their administrative and technical contributions to this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Key messages

• Black men are susceptible to psychological symptoms after serious injuries

• Study participants identified multiple interpersonal and systems-based barriers to seeking professional mental healthcare

• Mental health interventions tailored to diminish barriers to mental healthcare utilization in injured Black men may improve psychological outcomes

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by National Institutes of Health/National Institute of Nursing Research grant number [NIH R01NR013503], (PI: Richmond). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the authors and do no necessarily represent the official views of the National Institute of Nursing Research/National INstitutes of Health.