Establishing national mental health and well-being indicators for Scotland

The growing interest in the mental health and well-being of populations raises questions about traditional measures of public mental health, which have largely focused on levels of psychiatric morbidity. This paper describes work in progress to identify a set of national mental health and wellbeing indicators for Scotland that could be used to establish a summary mental health profile, as a starting point for monitoring future trends. The process in taking this work forward involves identifying a desirable set of indicators, scoping the data that are currently collected nationally in Scotland, identifying additional data needs, and ensuring existing data collection systems include mental health and well-being. It is expected that an indicator set for adults will have been identified by 2007. The paper presents some of the conceptual and practical challenges involved in defining and measuring positive mental health and is presented here as a contribution to ongoing debates in this field.