What is it about?
Most of the article talks about mental disorders like anxiety or depression in later stage, where only help seeking may not be enough. Our paper explores the determinants that boost early help seeking for mental distress women experience in their life time
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Why is it important?
Moderate or severe anxiety and depression is hard to cure only by mental or emotional support, most often needs pharmacotherapy. Still there is chances to relapse in later life. Early support and management even without medicines is proved to prevent severity at the very first place. Moreover, Most women from LMICs don't have rhe privilege to bear the cost of frequent visit to psychologists either. that's why we highlighted the importance early help seeking and mental health promotion for early help seeking.
Perspectives
As we progress through the era of technology, internet or smartphone based support for mental distress is getting highlighted. But scholars are forgetting about the LMICs, where internet or smartphone isn't that common, specially anong women of lower wealth quintiles in rural region, for example, we found that only 5% of women in poorest wealth quintile have access to internet, below middle quintile the proportion is only 10%, So internet based intervention is already boosting inequalities which is already there for a long time. Moreover TVs are more common than internet in these quintiles but our study found it is not utilized! That's a major loss. Though TV is more common, there are still a large proportion of women who dont have access to any of those, for those peer support within them could be necessary ajd beneficial which is still not under consideration. To sum up, proportion of help seeking at early stage is very poor, there's no awareness program to accelerate early help seeking, embedded resource is not being utilized properly, internet based intervention is increasing imequality. That's our perspective.
Tanvir Ahmed
BRAC University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Determinants of early mental health help-seeking among women in Bangladesh: A nationally representative bootstrapped regression analysis, PLOS Mental Health, September 2025, PLOS,
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmen.0000420.
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