To Flourish or Not: Positive Mental Health and All-Cause Mortality

Read an abstract of an American Journal of Public Health article that examines whether the integration of the three types of well-being–emotional, psychological, and social–into the categorization of positive mental health predicts 10-year all-cause mortality.

The article further explores the extent to which 12-month diagnosis of internalizing psychopathology, education, gender, race, age, risk behaviors, and pre-existing physical illness confounds or explains the association between positive mental health and mortality.

The authors found that the absence of positive mental health increased the probability of all-cause mortality for men and women at all ages after adjustment for known causes of death. The effect of the absence of positive mental health on mortality was independent of the individual and joint effects of factors known to be casually related to death, such as age, gender, race, physical activity, smoking, and physical disease.