Self‐Concealment and Willingness to Seek Counseling for Psychological, Academic, and Career Issues

Ideally, any person experiencing a problem would feel comfortable seeking counseling. However, this is often not the case. Although 1 in 4 (26.2%) Americans experience a mental health issue in a given year (Kessler, Chiu, Demler, & Walters, 2005), only 11% seek mental health services (Andrews, Issakidis, & Carter, 2001). The number of individuals who experience concerns but do not seek counseling represents a mandate for counselors to better understand the factors involved in the help-seeking process in order to improve interventions that encourage people to seek help when experiencing psychological distress. Self-concealment, the active concealment of personal, distressing, or negative information from others (Larson & Chastain, 1990), has recently become a focus of research on help-seeking attitudes and behaviors. Cramer (1999) introduced a model in which self-concealment is related to help seeking through its relationships with social support, distress, and attitudes toward help. However, several aspects of the model have not been examined, such as (a) its relevance for those currently experiencing a problematic issue, (b) its applicability across diverse treatment issues, and (c) the role that different types of support play in the model. College is generally a stressful life period, and college students are experiencing more psychological, academic, and career-related concerns than they have in the past (Benton, Robertson, Tseng, Newton, & Benton, 2003). From a clinical standpoint, it is important to differentiate between individuals who are experiencing a problem and those who are not. It is also important to distinguish whether current models of help seeking will differ depending on the current issue a person is facing. For this reason, we sought to evaluate the applicability of the key aspects of Cramer's (1999) model for individuals who identified as experiencing a current psychological, academic, or career-related concern. We also examined the applicability of Cramer's model across different types of concerns by differentiating between issues of a psychological nature and academic and career-related concerns. * Self-Concealment and Help Seeking Cramer's (1999) model shows that self-concealment is linked to willingness to seek counseling through the mediators of social support, psychological distress, and attitudes toward seeking help. Specifically, Cramer's findings indicated that individuals who tend to conceal information also experience less social support, greater psychological distress, and less positive attitudes toward seeking help. In Cramer's study, a person's attitudes toward seeking help and level of psychological distress predicted her or his willingness to seek help from a counselor. An important contribution of Cramer's model is its capacity to account for inconsistent findings of previous studies. For example, Kelly and Achter (1995) found that self-concealment contributed to more negative help-seeking attitudes but, paradoxically, also led to a greater willingness to seek help. Similarly, Cepeda-Benito and Short (1998) found that individuals who had sought help more frequently in the past reported greater self-concealment tendencies. These different findings regarding the role of self-concealment were shown by Cramer to be due, potentially, to the role of other factors influencing the decision to seek help. Specifically, although self-concealment may contribute to negative attitudes toward counseling that then decrease the level of help seeking, the relationship of self-concealment with decreased social support and higher psychological distress may ultimately result in these individuals seeking counseling (Cramer, 1999). Although Cramer's (1999) findings improve the understanding of the help-seeking process, the support for this model is based on samples of individuals who were not necessarily experiencing an issue for which counseling would be beneficial. …