Specific factors influence help-seeking among Black male survivors of traumatic injury
Severe posttraumatic stress symptoms created pathways to seeking help among some Black men who survived exposure to trauma, according to study results published in Journal of Traumatic Stress.
“In our previous research with seriously injured Black men who had persistent psychological symptoms following their injuries, we found that many would not seek help and they identified barriers to seeking professional help,” Therese S. Richmond, PhD, RN, FAAN, of Penn Injury Science Center and the School of Nursing at University of Pennsylvania, told Healio Psychiatry. “It became clear we must look beyond thinking about the traumatic injury in isolation and instead incorporate the life journey and many contextual factors that affect seeking help, including fear of stigma, racial discrimination and financial resources.”
In the current fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), Richmond and colleagues aimed to determine how social factors and traumatic symptoms combined toward the outcome of psychological help-seeking. Specifically, they sought to determine multiple causal pathways related to how these factors came together among various groups of Black men with traumatic injury.
The investigators analyzed qualitative and quantitative data of 32 individuals from this population admitted to a level one trauma center. They used qualitative interviews to explore participants’ attitudes toward seeking professional psychological help and collected quantitative data on posttraumatic stress and depression symptoms, discrimination/stigma and financial worry.
Results of fsQCA revealed three causal pathways for psychological help-seeking. Of these, two showed severe trauma symptoms in the absence of financial worry prompted seeking help; however, the third showed financial worry and discrimination without trauma symptoms were sufficient. The investigators noted two causal pathways for negated help-seeking: low posttraumatic symptom severity and low levels of financial worry or discrimination were sufficient for avoiding seeking psychological help-seeking.
“These findings should inform future research on the best ways to deliver services to Black men who are survivors of trauma,” study author John A. Rich, MD, MPH, professor of health management and policy at Drexel University Dornsife School of Public Health, told Healio Psychiatry. “We should understand that motivation for help-seeking is complex and requires research methods that do not create racially biased stereotypes but rather specifically look at the intersection of multiple causal factors so that we can design and implement programs that really work for survivors who need them. More importantly, the results suggest that health systems should proactively root out discrimination and racism in their delivery of services and should seek to address not only the psychological wounds of trauma, but also the social factors that hinder healing.”