Authors:

Sunny Lee

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About Paper:

Mental health help-seeking among college students is shaped by a complex interplay of cultural background, institutional context, and individual experience. This study examines how cultural upbringing influences mental health perceptions, stigma, and help-seeking behavior among undergraduate students at a highly selective Midwestern institution, with particular attention to differences between East Asian international and domestic students. Using a mixed-methods design combining a quantitative survey (N=53) and semi-structured interviews (N=10), | find that group differences were more limited than prior literature revealed. Quantitative analyses revealed no statistically significant differences between groups across ten thematic composites, including stigma, help-seeking likelihood, and campus climate attitudes. The one significant item-level finding was that East Asian international students more strongly endorsed the belief that mental health problems reflect personal weakness, consistent with prior literature on Confucian values and internalized stigma. Qualitative analysis revealed that both groups described a shared campus culture that normalizes and glorifies academic stress. The institutional environment appeared to shape mental health attitudes across cultural backgrounds. At the same time, the underlying cultural frameworks differed: international students more often described mental health as simply absent from their upbringing, while domestic students from immigrant or minority households described it as recognized but dismissed. International students also faced distinct structural barriers to care, including insurance uncertainty and immigration-related stress. Findings suggest that institutional culture and within-group heterogeneity play a larger role in shaping student mental health behavior than is typically captured by demographic groupings alone, with implications for campus programming and culturally responsive care. a N SOPHO O STOO OSOSHS SOC OSS SOHO OCT SOC HSC OOO OOOH SL OOCO TO OOOO

Source:

University of Chicago

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Co-authors:

Sunny Lee