Objectives: We scrutinize the health care use of divorcees, in order to explain why users of mental health care have a higher risk of perceiving an unmet need. We hypothesize that a perception of low helpfulness of received care heightens the risk of perceiving an unmet need and becoming a less frequent health care user.
Methods: Three subsamples from the Divorce in Flanders survey are selected: those who contacted a general practitioner (n=816), a psychiatrist (n=205), or a psychologist (n=251) because of social or emotional problems. Logistic regressions are used in order to explore the correlates of subjective unmet need and the frequency of contact with a health care provider among each subsample.
Results: show that patients who perceived that care was not helpful more often reported an unmet need and made less frequent use of health care.
Conclusions: These findings suggest that people are less inclined to seek further help when they perceive previous help as being ineffective.
© 2014.