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The statistics show that 450 million people around the globe are suffering from mental disorders. These victims require formal treatments from trained professionals in collaboration with patients caretakers. However, the literature demonstrates that caretakers are conflicted by traditions and modernity influences in managing mentally ill patients at home. Research is thus important to understand the factors which influence mental health seeking behaviour among community members. To use Health Belief Model to explain factors influencing mental health seeking behavior among caretakers of mentally ill patients in Zanzibar. A community based analytical cross-section study design was used to generate data from 246 randomly selected caretakers in Zanzibar. A 30 items semi-structured questionnaire was used for data collection while a statistical package for social sciences (SPSS v. 23) software was used for analysis. Bivariate and Multivariate Logistic regression was used to assess the factors influencing mental health seeking behaviour. A majority of caretakers, i.e. 145(58.9%), had inappropriate mental health seeking behavior. 157(63.8%), 139(56.5%), 198(80.5%) and 156(63.3%) of caretakers were aware of formal mental treatment, perceived formal mental treatment to be not beneficial, perceived barrier to access formal mental health treatment and perceived mental illness to have severe complications respectively. After adjusted for confounders, the factors which influenced mental health seeking behaviour were awareness on formal mental health treatment [Not aware (AOR = 0.907 at 95% CI: 0.406-10.009; p<0.004) compared to those who were aware and perceived severity (AOR = 4.635; p<0.01; 95%CI: 2.397, 9.021) compared to those who perceived mental illness to have no severe complications. Despite a majority of caretakers were aware on formal mental health treatment, still a majority of the respondents had inappropriate healthcare seeking behavior. Moreover, on the perceptions, a majority of the respondents perceived formal mental health treatment to be not beneficial, perceived barrier on accessing them and that mental illness had no severe complications. Of the health belief variables, only awareness and perceived severity significantly influenced mental health seeking behavior. The study recommends Health facilities to establish home basic care activities to the mentally ill patients in the community. This would help the caretakers to receive knowledge to the specialist on how to care psychiatric patients at home to avoid severe illness of the mental illness, to prevent relapse cases , to make life easy to the patient and community at large and to avoid complication and death. |
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