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Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey

BACKGROUND: New troublesome drug trends constitute a challenge for public health. Sweden has the second highest drug-related mortality rate in Europe. This calls for an investigation into the help-seeking attitudes of young adults to early middle-aged individuals asking how they would act in acute d...

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Autores principales: Soussan, Christophe, Kjellgren, Anette
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7434193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32934586
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1455072519852837
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author Soussan, Christophe
Kjellgren, Anette
author_facet Soussan, Christophe
Kjellgren, Anette
author_sort Soussan, Christophe
collection PubMed
description BACKGROUND: New troublesome drug trends constitute a challenge for public health. Sweden has the second highest drug-related mortality rate in Europe. This calls for an investigation into the help-seeking attitudes of young adults to early middle-aged individuals asking how they would act in acute drug-related emergency or overdose situations. METHODS: In total, 1232 individuals completed an online survey promoted on Sweden’s largest discussion forum Flashback.org. Their free-text responses were analysed according to inductively generated categories. RESULTS: Around 60% of the sample would act as expected and contact emergency care without hesitation. However, approximately 32% of the sample showed palpable resistance and would put off seeking help and use emergency care only as a last resort due to, for example, fear of legal repercussions and stigma. Moreover, 8% displayed a total lack of confidence in public healthcare and would avoid it at all costs or entirely disregard it as an option due to the alleged risk of negative consequences and experienced restrictions on their personal freedom. CONCLUSIONS: While the inevitable criminalisation and stigmatisation associated with Sweden’s “zero tolerance” drug policy putatively serve as deterrents to drug use, our results demonstrate that these measures may also contribute to attitudes which discourage help-seeking. Such attitudes may at least partly explain the growing and comparatively high number of drug-induced deaths. Therefore, attitudinal and structural barriers to acute help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations should be acknowledged and investigated further in order to minimise harm.
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spelling pubmed-74341932020-09-14 Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey Soussan, Christophe Kjellgren, Anette Nordisk Alkohol Nark Research Report BACKGROUND: New troublesome drug trends constitute a challenge for public health. Sweden has the second highest drug-related mortality rate in Europe. This calls for an investigation into the help-seeking attitudes of young adults to early middle-aged individuals asking how they would act in acute drug-related emergency or overdose situations. METHODS: In total, 1232 individuals completed an online survey promoted on Sweden’s largest discussion forum Flashback.org. Their free-text responses were analysed according to inductively generated categories. RESULTS: Around 60% of the sample would act as expected and contact emergency care without hesitation. However, approximately 32% of the sample showed palpable resistance and would put off seeking help and use emergency care only as a last resort due to, for example, fear of legal repercussions and stigma. Moreover, 8% displayed a total lack of confidence in public healthcare and would avoid it at all costs or entirely disregard it as an option due to the alleged risk of negative consequences and experienced restrictions on their personal freedom. CONCLUSIONS: While the inevitable criminalisation and stigmatisation associated with Sweden’s “zero tolerance” drug policy putatively serve as deterrents to drug use, our results demonstrate that these measures may also contribute to attitudes which discourage help-seeking. Such attitudes may at least partly explain the growing and comparatively high number of drug-induced deaths. Therefore, attitudinal and structural barriers to acute help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations should be acknowledged and investigated further in order to minimise harm. SAGE Publications 2019-06-05 2019-12 /pmc/articles/PMC7434193/ /pubmed/32934586 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1455072519852837 Text en © The Author(s) 2019 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Research Report
Soussan, Christophe
Kjellgren, Anette
Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title_full Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title_fullStr Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title_full_unstemmed Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title_short Alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: Results from a Swedish online survey
title_sort alarming attitudinal barriers to help-seeking in drug-related emergency situations: results from a swedish online survey
topic Research Report
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7434193/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/32934586
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1455072519852837
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