Abstract

This study was designed as descriptive to identify psychological help-seeking attitudes of helping professional candidates and factors influencing them. The research population consisted of 447 first and fourth grade students studying in the Departments of Psychological Counselling and Guidance, Psychology or Nursing at Ondokuz Mayis University. 365 of them who was reached, and accepted to participate in the research constituted the sample group. “Personal Information Form” and “Attitudes toward Seeking Psychological Help Scale” developed by Türküm (2004) to analyze psychological help-seeking attitudes were used as data collection tools. In data analysis, after descriptive analysis, the student t-test was applied to compare the mean values of two groups in normal distribution; analysis of variance (ANOVA) and factorial ANOVA were used to compare the mean values of more than two groups; and Tukey’s test was run for post hoc analysis. This research indicated that psychological help-seeking levels of helping professional candidates were statistically significant in terms of gender, department, and experience of receiving psychological help before, but not of grade. Thus, the findings derived from this study should be considered when planning activities related to psychological counselling for students in this group.

Key words: Counsellor, psychologist, nurse, psychological counselling, helping professions