Mental Health: key points

• Mental Health is composed of two dimensions: mental health problems and mental wellbeing (positive mental health).
• Contextual factors that are associated with mental health can operate at the individual, community and structural level. 
• The Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Well-Being Scale (WEMWBS) is a new scale that measures adult mental wellbeing, based on responses to 14 questions.  WEMWBS runs from 14 (the lowest level of wellbeing) to 70 (the highest). 
• In 2008, the mean WEMWBS score for Scottish adults aged 16+ was 50.2 for men and 49.7 for women. 
• The mean life satisfaction score for Scottish adults aged 18+ in 2007 period was 8.08, on a scale of zero (extremely dissatisfied) to 10 (extremely satisfied). Levels of life satisfaction have not changed significantly since 2002.  
• In 2004, 8.3% of children in Scotland aged 5-15 had a clinically recognised emotional or behavioural mental health problem.
• In 2000, prevalence of neurotic disorders in the Scottish population was around 141 cases per 1000 adults.
• Women had a higher prevalence than men for all neurotic disorders.
• Adult mental health and its associated contextual factors in Scotland have seen much stability over the last decade, with more indicators showing improvement than deterioration.

• Mental health and its context is distributed unevenly across the Scottish adult population, with inequalities evident for age, gender, deprivation and socioeconomic status.

Section updates: The last major update of this section was completed in February 2010. The next major update is due to be carried out by February 2011.