Group- and individual-level self-stigma reductions in promoting psychological help-seeking attitudes among college students in helping skills courses.

To promote psychological help-seeking, researchers have studied interventions to reduce self-stigma, a personally held belief that seeking psychological help would make one undesirable and socially unacceptable. We examined the differential impact of individual- and group-level changes in self-stigma on psychological help-seeking attitudes using data from 189 college students nested within 20 sections of a semester-long helping skills lab groups. We applied multi-level polynomial regression and response surface analysis to determine whether discrepancy between pre- and posttest self-stigma scores (i.e., reduction in self-stigma) predicted change in attitudes at the individual- and section-levels. Individual reduction in self-stigma did not predict psychological help-seeking attitudes but students who maintained consistently low to moderate levels of self-stigma throughout the course developed significantly more positive attitude toward psychological help-seeking. On the other hand, we found that greater section level reductions in self-stigma significantly predicted more positive psychological help-seeking attitudes, suggesting potential importance of group norm changes and effects in modifications of individual attitudes. Implications for research and stigma reduction strategies are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record