Personality traits and the use of manual, alternative, and mental healthcare services and medication in Norwegian musicians

To investigate the association between personality traits and use of analgesic medication, anti-depressants and sedatives, mental health services, manual and alternative healthcare services among Norwegian musicians, 1607 musicians from the Norwegian Musicians Union answered an online questionnaire. Based on logistic regression analysis, adjusting for age, sex, education and general health, we investigated a possible dose-response relationship between the personality traits neuroticism, extraversion, openness to experience, agreeableness and conscientiousness and the use of these services and types of medication. As hypothesized, Neuroticism was positively associated with excess use of all types of the before mentioned health care services and medications. A higher score on openness to experience was positively associated with use of alternative and complementary healthcare services. Contrary to our expectations, extraversion was positively associated with the use of mental health care services and unrelated to other type of health care and medication use. Conscientiousness was negatively associated with the use of mental health care services. The results suggest that the relationship between personality and healthcare use cannot be attributed to occupation alone. The findings address the importance of differentiating behavior outcome (i.e. the use of health care services) from other outcome like symptom reporting or attitudes towards help seeking.