Barriers to Mental Health Help-Seeking Among Asian American Adolescents: A Systematic Review

Research has shown a racial divide in mental health service utilization in North America, with individuals from Asian backgrounds being the least likely to seek professional support despite their significant needs. Adolescents of Asian heritage are particularly at risk given the complexity of their help-seeking process (e.g., parental approval, culturally related stigma). The present systematic review aimed to identify the barriers that Asian American and Asian Canadian adolescents face in seeking professional mental health support. Database (ERIC, Medline, APA PsycInfo) and citation searches (as of May 10, 2024) resulted in 15 empirical articles meeting the inclusion criteria: The help receivers were 12- to 19-year-old Asian adolescents residing in the United States or Canada, and barriers related to mental health help-seeking were reported. Two coders assessed the quality of the included studies and synthesized themes related to barriers at the individual, family, and systemic levels. Findings indicate that mental health stigma, inadequate mental health literacy, a lack of emotionally validating home environment, the Model Minority Myth, and practical obstacles (e.g., financial difficulty) are prominent barriers to treatment seeking. One limitation was that all included studies focused on first- or second-generation immigrants of East or Southeast Asian backgrounds in the United States, which could affect the generalizability of the results to families with more recent immigration histories or those residing in different countries. Collectively, these results highlight the potential importance of considering multifaceted barriers when providing mental health support to adolescents of Asian heritage and underscore the need for further research in this area.