Gender Role Conflict, Psychological Distress and Help Seeking Attitudes among Iranian Men

The main purpose of the present study was to investigate the relationship between gender role conflict and the severity of symptoms of mental disorders and the attitude towards help-seeking in Iranian men. 302 male students of three universities, namely University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran University and Shahid-Beheshti University, completed a questionnaire including demographic characteristics, the gender role conflict scale (O’Neil et al. 1986), Brief Symptoms Inventory (Derogatis et al., 1983), and the short form of the Attitudes Toward Seeking Professional Psychological Help Scale (Fischer et al., 1995). The results of simultaneous regression analysis showed that psychological distress had the most positive relationship with the factors of "work-family conflict", "restrictive emotionality" and "success, power, competition", respectively, and the attitude towards help-seeking has the most negative relationship with " restrictive emotionality " and "success, power, competition" factors, respectively. Also, the proposed structural model of the present study about the effects of the masculine gender role conflict on psychological distress from two direct and indirect paths (through the negative effect on help-seeking attitude) had a good fit. Thus, it seems that the masculine gender role conflict increases the severity of psychological distress through a negative effect on the help-seeking attitude.