Exploring Identity Dynamics in Mental Help-Seeking Trajectories: An Ethnographic Study Among Inpatient Service Users of Two Belgian Psychiatric Hospitals

Using an ethnographic approach, in combining interviews with forty-two inpatient service users and participant observations, this research explored service users' experiences of their help seeking trajectories in an effort to uncover identity dynamics by which these are informed. They described both identity dynamics that made them postpone their search for help, like their belief in the essential difference between themselves and mental health service users; and dynamics that catalyzed their hospitalization, like the loss of social roles. Their accounts illustrate how experiences of barriers and facilitators for help seeking are closely intertwined with identity and therefore context related dynamics.