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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...
Autores principales: | , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
SAGE Publications
2019
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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. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-7434193 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2019 |
publisher | SAGE Publications |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
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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