A Structural Model Predicting Arab American’s Attitudes towards Mental Health Services from Ethnic Identity, Acculturation, and Spirituality (original) (raw)
2018, Journal of Mental Disorders and Treatment
Objective: The present study was based on the Multicultural Assessment-Intervention Process (MAIP) framework and examined the effects of acculturation, ethnic identity, and spirituality on Arab American mental health service utilization attitudes. Methods: Based on a convenience sample of 298 Arab American adults, a structural model was configured with ethnic identity directly predicting both Heritage and Mainstream Acculturation. Each of these was proposed to both directly predict the willingness to seek psychological services as well as indirectly through spirituality. Results: The results showed that greater levels of ethnic identity were associated with more acculturation for both the heritage and mainstream domains. In turn, greater levels of both heritage and mainstream acculturation stategies were predictive of higher levels of individuals being more receptive to seeking psychological help. However, spirituality did not appear to be related to the willingness to seek psychological services. Conclusions: It appeared that Arab American mental health help-seeking attitudes were predicted by ethnocultural variables as generally described by the MAIP model. Implications for future Arab American research were discussed. will first utilize a variety of community ethnic Arab traditional healing resources prior to seeking help from the behavioral healthcare system [6]. Arab American traditional healers tend to take an active personal role in guiding, instructing, and suggesting courses of action, including engagement of family authorities as opposed to more formalized and detached mental health treatment [7]. Several advantages of traditional healing systems over formal behavioral health services include: nonstigmatizing cultural practices, management of counter-transference issues, community and familial collaborations, and using culturally based idioms of distress [6]. Challenges to traditional healing methods are that many of these religious leaders may not be qualified or sufficiently knowledgeable to provide mental health services [6]. Recent empirical evidences [8] suggest that both Christian and Muslim Arab Americans prefer religious leaders to mainstream community mental health services. Challenges to Arab American help-seeking processes include Arab social norms concerning family orientation and fatalism, and views about mental health social stigma and disclosure. For example, Arab American families often provide a form of collective social support and may even serve as a proxy for professional intervention services [6] Mental health help-seeking may also be influenced by a religious
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