Sources of emotional help sought by low income women of Mexican descent

MarySue V Heilemann1, Darcy Copeland

  • 1University of California, Los Angeles, School of Nursing, Los Angeles, California 90095-6919, USA. mheilema@sonnet.ucla.edu

From a larger convenience sample of 315 women of Mexican descent, the focus of this secondary analysis of cross sectional data was a subset of 68 women who reported that they sought help for feelings of sadness, hopelessness, or depression within the last year Women who sought help from professional sources had significantly higher depressive (CES-D) and PTSD (IES-R) symptoms than women who sought help from "other or multiple" sources that included friends. Women who sought help exclusively from family or from professionals scored over the CES-D and IES-R cutpoints. Results are useful for designing future research on help-seeking preferences of Latina women.

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