Culture And Shame-Focused Attitudes Toward Mental Health

Introduction

Nowadays, no matter western country or eastern, because of the large pressure from family, work and other aspects, more and more people have the mental problem. However, even though there are high amount of people have the mental illness, only one in four are seeking help. In order to find out what are the reason for this problem, there are lots of research indicate different demographic factors which would influence the attitude toward seek professional attitude.

The research by Chen and Mak (2008) indicated that culture is one of the reasons for influencing the attitude towards professional help. In order to test the result, they investigated four different cultural groups of people which are European Americans, Chinese Americans, Hong Kong Chinese, and Mainland Chinese. The results shown that European and Chinese Americans are more likely to seek help than Hong Kong and Mainland Chinese. Later, the research conducted by Wilson (2010) analyzed that stress would be one of the factor as well. In his study, he concluded that if the participants with higher level of stress symptoms, they would seek less help from the others. He also demonstrated that young people are holding the negative attitude towards seek help if they are mental illness. However, Fischer and Farina (1995) disagree gave another opinion. They

Hampton and Sharp (2013) conducted a study which effects of gender and culture on shame-focused attitudes toward mental health problems. They use three cultural groups which were Asian, Latino, and Caucasian American. However, at this stage, it is shown there are no significant gender difference in shame-focused attitudes toward mental health problem. Furthermore, it was also concluded that Latino American are more shamed if they have the mental illness compared with the Chinese. It is interesting because it is shown two different results from one similar question by Chen and