ReviewFrontiers in psychiatry2024
Personality and help-seeking for psychological distress: a systematic review and meta-analysis.
Review in Frontiers in psychiatry, 2024. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 5 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
5 citing papers in PubMed.
- Personality Disorder Diagnoses in Outpatient Forensic Mental Health: A Comprehensive Prevalence Study in the Netherlands.Personality and mental health · 2026Article
- Depression and Anxiety Symptoms and Public Stigma of Receiving Psychological Help: The Mediating Role of Anticipated Stigma at Work among Healthcare Workers.The Psychiatric quarterly · 2026Article
- Type D personality and quality of life among polish university students: a cross-sectional study.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Article
- Conscientiousness personality is associated with increased thyroid nodule risk and sleep quality plays a masking role in this association.Scientific reports · 2025Article
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Authors and funding
7 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Introduction: The effective management of depression, anxiety, and other forms of psychological distress depends on individuals' readiness to seek and accept help for their mental suffering. Understanding which personality traits relate to help-seeking can help better tailor mental healthcare to individual needs. However, findings regarding associations of personality traits with help-seeking have been inconsistent. Methods: This systematic review and meta-analysis focused on English-language research studies on the association of personality (encompassing personality disorders, Five Factor -Big Five- dimensions, and other measures of personality) with depression, anxiety, or unspecified psychological distress in adults aged 18 years and older. Procedures followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. The search strategy included two concepts: personality and help-seeking and was carried out on PubMed, Embase, Web of Science, and PsycINFO. Reference tracking and searches on Google Scholar were additionally performed. Sufficiently homogeneous subsections were analyzed by meta-analysis. Results: A total of 48 studies described in 47 records reported on the association between personality and help-seeking. Nine assessed personality disorders, 29 Five Factor dimensions, and 13 other personality constructs. Twenty-three studies investigated attitudes towards help-seeking while 25 studies investigated help-seeking behaviors. Of the studies investigating behavior, three used external observations, the rest relied on self-reports/clinician-administered questionnaires. Evidence highlighted a dissociation between attitudes and behavior for schizotypal and borderline personality disorders, and neuroticism, which displayed negative help-seeking attitudes but more help-seeking behavior. By contrast, paranoid, schizoid and obsessive-compulsive personality disorders related to both negative help-seeking attitudes and behavior across studies. Limited evidence linked extraversion to social support seeking and conscientiousness to care seeking behaviors. Meta-analyses on the Five Factor dimensions and help-seeking attitudes supported robust negative associations with neuroticism, as well as positive associations with agreeableness, albeit less reliably. Other personality traits mostly corroborated the above relationships, while also contributing new perspectives, such as help-seeking behavior's negative associations with reality weakness and cynicism, and positive associations with abasement and rigidity. Discussion: Future research should investigate help-seeking behavior using external observations and longitudinal designs. Assessing personality in clinical settings can help identify populations at risk of keeping to themselves when mentally distressed.
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