Introduction
Suicide rates in very remote areas of Australia are more than twice those in major cities, with 21.0 deaths per 100,000 population compared to 10.0 in urban areas. This stark difference points to underlying disparities in mental health outcomes. While engaging with professional mental health services is essential, barriers to help-seeking remain a persistent challenge, particularly in regional and remote communities. Shame and stigma are widely recognized as psychological obstacles to seeking help for mental health, whereas self-compassion may offer a protective pathway toward engagement. However, the interplay among these factors across geographic contexts remains poorly understood.
Purpose
This study explores how shame and stigma influence help-seeking intentions, and whether self-compassion moderates these effects across urban, inner regional, and outer regional/remote Australian populations.
Method
Participants (N = 747) completed validated measures of mental health distress, shame, stigma, self-compassion, and help-seeking intentions. Hierarchical multiple regression analyses were conducted for each geographic group, controlling for mental health distress and testing interaction terms. Preliminary analyses are reported here.
Results
Initial findings indicate that stigma consistently suppresses help-seeking across all geographic groups, while shame demonstrates limited direct influence. Self-compassion appears to facilitate help-seeking, but only within inner regional contexts, where it also shows evidence of buffering the impact of shame. Mental health distress is a stronger predictor of help-seeking in urban and inner regional populations, but plays a less prominent role in remote areas. Multicollinearity among interaction terms affected the reliability of moderation effects, prompting further modeling to clarify these relationships and explore underlying mechanisms.
Conclusions
Preliminary results highlight stigma as a key barrier to help-seeking, with self-compassion showing promise as a protective factor in regional settings. Geographic differences suggest that tailored interventions may be needed. Further analyses will refine these findings and explore structural pathways, to inform policy and practice.