Men's Help-Seeking Willingness and Disclosure of Depression: Experimental Evidence for the Role of Pluralistic Ignorance

When experiencing depressive symptoms, many people delay or avoid seeking professional help. We investigate whether misperceptions of other's willingness to seek help can be a potential barrier for help-seeking by examining pluralistic ignorance (i.e., when members of a group mistakenly believe that others' cognitions or behaviors differ systematically from their own) in men and women's perceptions of others' help-seeking willingness. Experiment 1 (N = 2042) demonstrated that both men and women underestimate men's willingness to seek formal help but showed no evidence of pluralistic ignorance in women's perceptions of "most women's" help-seeking. For both men and women, self-rated willingness to seek help was strongly associated with the perception that other men/women would seek help. Based on these results, we proposed that a lower willingness to disclose help-seeking for depressive symptoms among men could be a source of misperceptions of men's help-seeking willingness. Experiment 2 (N = 1528) showed that men were less willing than women to disclose help-seeking for depression to friends and colleagues, which could contribute to misperceptions of men's help-seeking willingness. We argue that pluralistic ignorance can be a barrier for men's mental health help-seeking and discuss implications for interventions to increase the number of men who seek help when experiencing depressive symptoms.