Positive mental health as a predictor of recovery from mental illness

Abstract

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.

Make it Measurable: Assessing Psychological Distress, Wellbeing and Resilience at Scale in Higher Education

“…Longitudinal studies clearly indicate that low wellbeing and resilience leads to increased risk of future mental illness (Wood & Joseph, 2010). Similarly, high levels of wellbeing are protective for future mental illness (Keyes et al, 2010) and improving wellbeing among people with mental illness improves their rate of recovery (Iasiello et al, 2019). The current sample featured a large proportion of students with a need for improvements in resilience.…”

Psychological Adjustment in Spain during the COVID-19 Pandemic: Positive and Negative Mental Health Outcomes in the General Population

“…More specifically, the model suggests a bidimensional space, to understand mental health, that would include four distinct categories (i.e., 'languishing' with or without mental disorders, and 'flourishing' with or without mental disorders) where languishing and flourishing indicate the absence or presence, respectively, of psychological well-being (see Figure 1). The validity of the model has been supported by large-scale population studies showing that, for instance, languishing is associated to premature all-cause mortality (Fuller-Thomson et al, 2020) whereas flourishing is a predictor of recovery from mental health problems (Iasiello et al, 2019) and, in particular, from anxiety and mood disorders (Schotanus-Dijkstra et al, 2017). Therefore, it seems that positive aspects of functioning and well-being should be seriously considered when analysing the effects of life-threatening events, like a pandemic, if we want to get a more precise picture of the individuals' overall psychological adjustment.…”

A Salutogenic Mental Health Model: Flourishing as a Metaphor for Good Mental Health

“…Mental health being experienced as constantly present in life and a part of being could be a contradiction to the early work of Keyes, when he described flourishing as the presence of mental health and languishing as absence of mental health [1]. More recently, [3,12,38] languishing is denoted as the absence of positive mental health or "the lowest level of mental health" [39]. Based on the participants' way of speaking about the position "low in the staircase" [7], and Keyes' description of high, moderate, and low mental health, Fig.…”