Mediating roles of perceived stigma and mental health literacy in the relationship between school climate and help-seeking behavior in Indonesian adolescents

Objective This study aimed to investigate whether perceived stigma and mental health literacy play mediating roles in the correlation between school climate and help-seeking behavior in Indonesian adolescents. Methods We used cross-sectional study design that recruited 760 Indonesian adolescents of age 16–19 years. We used convenience sampling from July to September 2019. Bivariate analysis was used to investigate the association of demographic characteristics with help-seeking behavior. Mediation analysis was employed to explore the mediating roles of mental health literacy and perceived stigma on the relationship between school climate and help-seeking behavior. Results Findings indicated that ethnicity, family income, and father’s educational level were significantly associated (p < 0.05) with help-seeking behavior in Indonesian adolescents. Furthermore, perceived stigma and mental health literacy sequentially showed partial mediating roles in the relationship between school climate and help-seeking behavior (indirect effect: 0.004; 95% CI: 0.001, 0.010). Our mediating model indicated that a high level of school climate was associated with low perceived stigma (b = −0.11, p < 0.001) and high mental health literacy (b = 0.28, p < 0.001) and higher help-seeking behavior (b = 0.14, p < 0.001). Conclusion Our study discovered novel insight of help-seeking behavior mechanism among adolescent by serial mediation test. Supportive school climate is necessary to achieve adequate help-seeking behavior. In addition, taking into account of student’s perceived stigma and mental health literacy in promoting help-seeking behavior is also important. © 2024 Setia Lesmana, Chung. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.