Awareness of mental health and wellbeing has steadily increased in recent years. Estimates of the extent and the adverse impacts of mental health problems underline the urgent need for more research to understand the causes and the consequences of mental ill health and to identify the most effective interventions. Existing longitudinal and cohort studies provide unique opportunities to answer key questions about population mental health and wellbeing.

The Catalogue of Mental Health Measures is designed to provide easy access to information about the mental health measures included in British cohort and longitudinal studies to maximise the uptake of existing data and facilitate mental health research. Created by Professor Louise Arseneault in 2019, the Catalogue has expanded to include 55 studies and is among the premier resources for information about mental health measures in British longitudinal studies.

The Catalogue is based on a review of the mental health, wellbeing, personality and temperament measures in UK cohort and longitudinal studies. The Catalogue focuses on studies that meet five main criteria. To be included in the Catalogue, studies need to:

• Have collected, or plan to collect, data at multiple time points. Most studies in the Catalogue are cohort or household panel studies, which means that data were collected about the same individuals or households over time. A small number of large repeated cross-sectional studies, which collected information from a new sample at each time point, have also been included because of their value to mental health research.
• Include measures of mental health or wellbeing.
• Have at least 200 participants at the first data collection point.
• Have collected data in the UK. Most studies in the Catalogue have an exclusively UK-based sample. A small number of studies have included international samples in addition to a British sample.
• Be ongoing. Studies must have collected data in the last two years, be currently collecting data or have firm plans to collect new data to be included at this stage.

By providing details of the measures and studies, the Catalogue serves as a resource for researchers who may be:

• Searching for datasets that include mental health and wellbeing measures
• Curious about the mental health and wellbeing measures collected by a specific study
• Designing harmonisation studies
• Planning further data collection and preparing grant applications
• Less familiar with mental health or from other disciplines, such as demographers, economists, urbanists, linguists, etc.

The Catalogue is in collaboration with DATAMIND, the Health Data Research UK Data Hub for Mental Health Research, leading the core activity on Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable (FAIR) curated mental health data across the four nations of the UK.

Placement Students

Hannah Lewis, undergraduate placement student

Maria Jose Rodriguez Pinzon, undergraduate placement student

Alumni

Lily Strange, research assistant

Georgia Andrews, undergraduate placement student

Daniel Yu, undergraduate placement student

Dr Rukmen Sehmi, postdoctoral researcher