{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02373887240356083, 'fraction_numerical': 0.003956478733926805, 'mean_word_length': 5.483974358974359, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
A Sickness of the Soul: An Exploration into Self and Social Stigma towards Help Seeking in Indonesia

Objective: Mental health stigma is pervasive in Indonesia – a country with over 270 million inhabitants. Individuals with mental health have been socially ostracized, considered unreligious or unclean, and in some areas, been locked up in makeshift stocks or prisons. Resultingly, individuals suffering from poor mental health may not seek help. Therefore, an important step in improving mental wellbeing and promoting help seeking for mental health is understanding help seeking stigma and its associated factors.Methods: In this study, 409 individuals from the local community completed a guided survey, consisting of self-stigma (internalized stigma against help seeking) and public stigma (societal norms against help seeking) questionnaires, demographic details, questionnaires assessing depression and anxiety, followed by an open-ended question on how they conceptualize mental health.Results: Analyses revealed that while public stigma does not differ as a function of demographics or either anxiety or depression, self-stigma decreased as family income and education increased – in contrast with previous findings. Further, there was a negative association between anxiety and self-stigma. Interestingly, while we found that over 30% of the respondents associated mental health with spiritual terms in the open-ended questions – in line with the prevalent use of the term ‘a sickness of the soul’ to describe mental health - further analysis suggested that stigma did not differ among individuals who did and did not adopt this viewpoint.Conclusions: Therefore, our analyses suggest that while the internalization of stigma against help seeking can vary as a function of several factors, thus far, how an individual perceives social acceptability of help seeking is uniform. Further, we provide evidence that the link between help seeking is not associated with conceptualizing mental health in religious terms.