Mental Health Service Use and Barriers to Accessing Services in a Cohort of Transgender, Gender Diverse, and Non-binary Adults in Australia
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Pepping, CA
Lyons, A
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Introduction: Transgender, gender diverse, and non-binary people (TGDNB) access mental health services more frequently compared to the cisgender population, yet they continue to experience significant unmet mental health needs. The present study examined rates of mental health service use, satisfaction with services, barriers to service access, and help-seeking intentions in a sample of TGDNB adults in Australia. In addition, we examined whether barriers to service access were associated with help-seeking intentions. Methods: Participants were 150 TGDNB adults (Mage = 37.19, SD = 15.73) who reported transfeminine (n = 77), transmasculine (n = 37), or non-binary (n = 36) genders. Self-reported recency of service use, satisfaction with services, barriers to service access, and help-seeking intentions were obtained in an online questionnaire, completed in 2016. Results: Most participants had accessed mental health services in the past 6 months (55.3%). However, less than two thirds were either very satisfied (28%) or somewhat satisfied (32.7%) with these services. Common barriers to accessing services included a lack of professionals adequately trained and competent to work with TGDNB people, the cost of services, and concern with being treated poorly. Barriers to accessing services were negatively associated with help-seeking intentions, and stigma-related barriers had a greater negative effect on help-seeking intentions when satisfaction with prior services was low. Conclusions: TGDNB adults face multiple barriers to accessing mental health services, many of which appear to predict help-seeking intentions. Policy Implications: Implications and future research directions are discussed, with particular emphasis on ways to reduce barriers to service access for TGDNB adults.
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Sexuality Research and Social Policy
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© The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
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Clinical and health psychology
Public health
Gender studies
Policy and administration
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Cronin, TJ; Pepping, CA; Lyons, A, Mental Health Service Use and Barriers to Accessing Services in a Cohort of Transgender, Gender Diverse, and Non-binary Adults in Australia, Sexuality Research and Social Policy, 2023