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 2006, the mean WEMWBS score for Scottish adults aged 16+ was 51. There was some evidence that those in the highest income band had higher scores than those in the lowest income bands.
- The mean life satisfaction score for Scottish adults aged 16+ in 2006 period was 7.4, 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.
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Mental health and its context is distributed unevenly across the Scottish adult population, with inequalities evident for age, gender, deprivation and socioeconomic status.
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