Multicultural perspectives of help-seeking, stress coping and assessment adaptation

Abstract

Welcome to the second issue of Asia Pacific Journal of Counselling and Psychotherapy in 2019! This issue includes eight selected articles with the major themes of help-seeking, coping, and validation of an assessment instrument. Authors draw attention to the conditions in diverse cultures, including those of Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Uganda, and Australia. Mental health professionals from all over the world have a common mission: to help their clients by promoting their psychological well-being. People of different cultural backgrounds may hold different attitudes towards help-seeking. In general, Westerners are more open to the use of mental health services than Asians. Raise Chan, Nigel Thompson and Calvin Yu compare help-seeking attitude, locus of control and emotional expressivity across Hong Kong people and Westerners and explore the relationships between these three factors. This inspires helping professionals to take cultural values into account when providing counselling services to clients of different cultural origins. The study conducted by Miki Noda, Yu Sakagami and Hiroshi Tsujimoto examines help-seeking behaviours in the Asian context. Overwhelming work-related stress can cause mental illness. Yet, people with mental disorders in Japan are often reluctant to seek mental health services. The authors explore the subjective experiences and psychological processes of employees who are accessing mental health services. They highlight how the strong and deeply-rooted sense of working role in the minds of Japanese employees can impede them from seeking mental health services and affect treatment outcomes. This reminds Japanese mental health professionals to be aware of the fixation and prioritization of ‘worker’ identity. Help-seeking is not restricted to the general public alone. Facing people with different emotional needs on a constant basis renders mental health practitioners vulnerable to burnout. Since they are trained to support the mental health of others, they are sometimes hesitant to seek help for themselves. Marieke Ledingham, Peter Standen, Chris Skinner and Robbie Busch utilise survey and semi-structured interviews to explore burnout-related beliefs and perceptions among mental health practitioners. The results of this study alert practitioners, supervisors and educators about the importance of self-care. Support for helping professionals is crucially important. Lacking systemic support, counsellors can experience the same mental health challenges as their clients. Lorien Jordan, Desiree Seponski and Stephanie Armes uncover the experiences of counsellors in Cambodia, where the counselling profession is still a newly-developing field. The participants’ shared accounts provide insights about the essential support they need. ASIA PACIFIC JOURNAL OF COUNSELLING AND PSYCHOTHERAPY 2019, VOL. 10, NO. 2, 93–94 https://doi.org/10.1080/21507686.2019.1640970