No abstract

The dual-continua model of mental health suggests that mental illness and positive mental health reflect distinct continua, rather than the extreme ends of a single spectrum. The aim of this review was to scope the literature surrounding the dual-continua model of mental health, to summarise the evidence, highlight the areas of focus for individual studies and discuss the wider implications of the model. A search was conducted in PsycINFO (n = 233), PsycARTICLES (n = 25), Scopus (n = 137) and PubMed (n = 47), after which a snowballing approach was used to scope the remaining literature. The current scoping review identified 83 peer-reviewed empirical articles, including cross-sectional, longitudinal and intervention studies, which found overall support for superior explanatory power of dual-continua models of mental health over the traditional bipolar model. These studies were performed in clinical and non-clinical populations, over the entire life-course and in Western and non-Western populations. This review summarised the evidence suggesting that positive mental health and mental illness are two distinct but interrelated domains of mental health; each having shared and unique predictors, influencing each other via complex interrelationships. The results presented here have implications for policy, practice and research for mental health assessment, intervention design, and mental health care design and reform.

Background.-High levels of positive mental health protects individuals from mental illness. This study investigates longitudinal change in positive mental health as a predictor of mental illness recovery in a cohort group. Methods.-Using data from the 1995 and 2005 Midlife in the United States cross-sectional surveys (n=1,723), logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratio that individuals diagnosed with a mental illness in 1995 would have recovered in 2005 based on whether their level of positive mental health changed over the 10-year period. Results.-Individuals who maintained or gained the highest levels of positive mental health were more than 27.6 and 7.4 times, respectively, more likely to recover when compared to those who maintained the lowest level of positive mental health. Those who maintained or gained moderate levels of positive mental health had more moderate likelihood of recovery, and those whose positive mental health declined to the lowest levels had no significantly different likelihood of recovery compared to participants whose positive mental health remained low. Limitations.-This study was limited by the age of the data, and the inability to control for some predictors of recovery.