CIVIL SERVANTS’ INTENTION IN SEEKING COUNSELLING SERVICES

Abstract

Moving along with the trend of globalization, mental illness has become a worldwide issue. To date, there are more than 450 million people in the world suffering from mental illness (Sheri & Town, 2015). According to Sheri and Town (2015), 1 in 5 Malaysians are suffering from psychological disorders. Correspondingly, a rise in suicide rate from 5.4 per 100,000 populations in 2010 to 5.8 per 100,000 populations in 2015 has been witnessed in Malaysia (The Statistics Portal, 2018).
According to Calcia, Bonsall, Bloomfield, Selvaraj, Barichello and Howes (2016), stress is the major cause for mental health problems. This is especially true and obvious among the workforce (Bilal, Ali, Naim, Ali and Ashmat, 2014). There are 53% of employees reporting that they are facing more stress, while 59% say their jobs are the cause of stress (The Isosceles Group, 2017). In particular, Malaysia civil servants are one of the most stressed groups because they need to be multi-tasking in their works (Bilal et al., 2014).
One way to tackle this issue is through seeking professional psychological treatment, such as counselling service (Bower, Knowles, Coventry & Rowland, 2011; Prins, Verhaak, Bensing & Meer, 2008). However, many Malaysians are either reluctant or not consider seeking counselling helps to solve their psychological relevant and mental health issues. According to Bavani, Mohan and Sorooshian (2012), the concept of counselling is not yet widely accepted by Malaysian society. People are afraid of prejudice by others due to the insufficient of knowledge and understanding about counselling service.
Surprisingly, scant research has been done to investigate the issue. Although previous studies have investigated factors influencing counselling seeking intention, majority of them utilized students as their sample (Bohon, Cotter, Kravitz, Cello & Fernandez y Garcia, 2016; Chan, Yeoh, & Migin, 2016; Givens & Tjia, 2002). Therefore, their result cannot be generalized into the working adult context. In view that Theory of Planned Behavior by Ajzen (1991) has been well-known for understand consumer decision making, thus this study aims to look into the counselling seeking phenomenon through three factors exhibited by Theory of Planned Behavior, which are attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and intention.