Mental illness stigma, psychological resilience, and help seeking: What are the relationships?

While the concepts of mental illness stigma, resilience, and help seeking are well established, scholars are only beginning to explore how these might be related. This qualitative study explored relationships between stigma, resilience, and help seeking in a focus group design. Results indicated two main themes related to stigma and resilience including: resilience helps decrease stigma, and stigma decreases resilience. Three main themes related to stigma, resilience, and help seeking were: stigma leads to decreased help seeking and decreased resilience, help seeking leads to stigma and lowered resilience, and help seeking leads to increased resilience and decreased stigma.