The associations of dispositional mindfulness with recognition of psychological disorders and willingness to seek help

Abstract

Background: Psychological disorder symptoms impact a large portion of the Canadian population, and while effective treatments are available, few people seek them out. This can be partly attributed to low mental health literacy: lack of knowledge about where to seek help or poor recognition of psychological disorder symptoms when present. Dispositional mindfulness (DM) is the capacity to pay non-judgmental attention to present-moment experiences. This construct is typified by acceptance and non-reactivity toward inner experiences, including negative emotions and psychological distress. This suggests higher DM may facilitate the recognition of psychological symptoms and may be associated with higher MHL. Purpose: The objective of the present study is to examine whether DM scores were meaningfully associated with psychological disorder symptom recognition and mental help-seeking attitudes (MHSAS). Method: A total of n = 299 participants (Mage = 41.04; 49.5% cis women) were recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and completed measures of depression (PHQ-9), anxiety (GAD-7), DM (FFMQ-24), and MHSAS (MHSAS-9). Further, participants read eight vignettes of fictitious patients (developed according to ICD-10 criteria) suffering from various psychological disorder symptoms, and the accuracy of their recognition of symptoms was tallied (PDR-V). Results: Correlation analyses revealed DM scores were positively associated with MHSAS (r = 0.25, p <.001), and PDR-V scores (r = 0.18, p <.001). Hierarchical regressions revealed that DM predicted variance in symptom recognition (1.3%) and MHSAS scores (6%) over and above demographic variables. Implication: DM shows an association with MHL components, and if an intervention effectively cultivates mindfulness, it may also enhance aspects of MHL.