Survey of Mental Health and Wellbeing in Taiwan (the first year)

It is announced by the World Health Organization in 2004 that “there is no health without mental health.” Globally, mental diseases have been considered as challenging health issues. Indeed, it is well documented that mental illnesses may seriously impact on people’s life quality and social functioning. In developed countries, mental diseases explain 15% of disability-adjusted life years (DALYs), exceeding the burden due to cancer and cardiovascular diseases. Thus, mental health promoting programs and policy have drawn more and more attention globally. In order to obtain a better picture on mental health in the community, it is important to build a mental health surveillance system to monitor people’s psychological health, behaviors, and conditions. These data are critical for the design, implementation, and evaluation of future mental health promoting programs. For the preparation of a full large-scale mental health survey, the main purposes of this study are to develop mental health survey instruments for international comparison and native investigation, to conduct a comprehensive pilot study, and to evaluate the feasibility of the study instruments, survey models, and data analysis methods developed by this project. Through systematical review on literature of mental health surveys conducted internationally and domestically, a survey instrument on mental health (e.g., issues on life quality, stress coping, social relations, resilience) will be developed accordingly for adults aged 18 and above after the administration of expert meetings and double translation verification, if necessary, on these questionnaires. A pilot study will be designed and implemented to collect data in the Northern, Central, Southern, and Eastern parts of Taiwan. For each area, 60 adults (with a total of 240) will be selected to fill in a computer-assisted personal interviewing instrument in their house to evaluate the reliability and validity of the survey instrument. Expert meetings will be held to verify the questionnaires and to examine the feasibility of the sampling strategy, survey models, and data analysis approaches for the future large-scale investigation on mental health. Recommendation will be proposed for the future large-scale mental health survey models in Taiwan. It is hoped that further prevention intervention programs and policy on mental health may be more appropriately designed and implemented based upon data in this surveillance system.