Importance: Patient disclosure to their clinician about experiencing an imminent threat is a critical step toward receiving support or assistance.
Objective: To examine the frequency of patients not disclosing their experience of imminent threats to their clinician and their reasons for doing so.
Design, setting, and participants: Survey study incorporating results from 2 national, nonprobability samples of 2011 US adults recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk (MTurk) from March 16 to 30, 2015, and 2499 recruited from Survey Sampling International (SSI) from November 6 to 17, 2015. Data analysis was conducted from December 20 to 28, 2018.
Main outcomes and measures: Self-reported nondisclosure of 4 types of imminent threats (depression, suicidality, abuse, and sexual assault) to their clinician and reasons for nondisclosure.
Results: There were 2011 participants in the MTurk sample (1210 [60.3%] female; 1696 [60.2%] white; mean [SD] age, 35.7 [12.4] years; age range, 18-79 years) and 2499 participants (1273 [51.0%] female; 1968 [78.8%] white; mean [SD] age, 61.0 [7.6] years; age range, 50-91 years) in the SSI sample. Among those who reported experiencing at least 1 of the 4 imminent threats, 613 of 1292 MTurk participants (47.5%) and 581 of 1453 SSI participants (40.0%) withheld information from their clinician. The most commonly endorsed reasons for withholding this information included being embarrassed (MTurk: 72.7%; SSI: 70.9%), not wanting to be judged or lectured (MTurk: 66.4%; SSI: 53.4%), and not wanting to engage in a difficult follow-up behavior (MTurk: 62.4%; SSI: 51.1%). Respondents who experienced at least 1 of the 4 imminent threats had significantly higher odds of nondisclosure in both samples if they were female (MTurk: odds ratio [OR], 1.66 [95% CI, 1.30-2.11]; and SSI: OR, 1.33 [95% CI, 1.07-1.67]) or younger (MTurk: OR, 0.99 [95% CI, 0.98-1.00]; and SSI: OR, 0.98 [95% CI, 0.97-1.00]). Worse self-rated health was also associated with nondisclosure, but only in the SSI sample (OR, 0.85 [95% CI, 0.74-0.96]).
Conclusions and relevance: This study suggests that many people withhold information from their clinicians about imminent health threats that they face. A better understanding of how to increase patients' comfort with reporting this information is critical to allowing clinicians to help patients mitigate these potentially life-threatening risks.