Mental wellbeing questionnaire

Questionnaire contributor and institution at the time of their advice

• Dr Anamaria Brailean, King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience
• Professor Gerome Breen, (i) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; (ii) South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Katrina A.S. Davis, (i) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; (ii) South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Professor Thalia Eley, (i) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; (ii) South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Professor Elaine Fox, University of Adelaide, School of Psychology
• Professor Matthew Hotopf, (i) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; (ii) South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Professor Louise M Howard, (i) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience; (ii) South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust
• Dr Christopher Hübel, (i) Aarhus University, School of Business and Social Sciences; (ii) King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience
• Professor Ann John, Swansea University Medical School
• Professor Andrew McIntosh, University of Edinburgh, Division of Psychiatry
• Dr Sian Oram, King’s College London, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience
• Professor Marcus Richards, University College London Institute of Mental Health
• Professor Daniel J. Smith, (i) University of Edinburgh, Division of Psychiatry; (ii) NHS Lothian
• Professor Stanley Zammit, (i) University of Bristol Medical School; (ii) Cardiff University School of Medicine

Yes please. Having information from people who have not had mental health conditions helps researchers understand why some people develop issues and others do not.

The questionnaire will guide you through the questions based on the responses that you give. This means that you will be asked questions that are tailored to your experiences of mental health. If you and your husband/wife/partner/friend have provided different answers to early questions, you may have been directed to different questions later in the questionnaire.

It has been six years since we asked participants to complete our first questionnaire on mental health, ‘Thoughts and Feelings’. This new questionnaire does contain some questions repeated from that, so that we can measure change in people’s mental wellbeing over time, but also some new questions.

The team of researchers involved in developing this new questionnaire with us are particularly keen to:

• understand the changing context of your mental health and wellbeing, particularly given the COVID-19 pandemic which affected everyone in different ways.
• get more information about mental health issues that are known to be common in your age group.
• find out more about some mental health issues where little is known about the experiences of people in your age group, for example in relation to panic and eating issues.

Yes please. It will be very helpful for researchers when trying to understand your experiences to know about any diagnosis that you might have had at any point in your life, even back in childhood and even if you would now no longer receive the same diagnosis.

No thank you. Question MHC4 asks about first-degree blood relatives; these are your parents, siblings or children because this can help researchers looking at the influence of nature and nurture on who develops mental health conditions. Wider family history is less helpful in this respect.

Yes please. The questions have been chosen to identify differences between usual feelings and feelings that may indicate a mental health condition, so please do continue to answer.

Please just do your best to think back to how you were feeling and provide us with your best estimate in relation to the areas we’re asking about. If you really can’t remember, please select ‘Do not know’ from the possible responses.

If you have a name of a medicine which doesn’t appear in our list (question D28), please first have a look online to see if it has any other names e.g. a brand name, as this may be one that we mention. If you cannot find the name of your medication in our list, please select the option of ‘Other antidepressant(s)’ from our list.

Yes please. The questions have been chosen to identify differences between usual feelings and feelings that may indicate a mental health condition, so please do continue to answer.

Even if these feelings and symptoms have been heightened for you over the last two weeks because of something that has happened in your life, we would still like you to tell us about your experience of these please. The questions have been chosen to identify differences between usual feelings and feelings that may indicate a mental health condition.

We understand that we are asking you to provide us with information about very sensitive subjects which may feel difficult for you to share. Researchers believe that there is often a link between stressful experiences in childhood/adulthood and the development of mental health issues at a later date. This questionnaire will help them to better understand the relationship between these experiences. We would be very grateful if you could help us by answering these questions as fully as possible, but if this feels too difficult or intrusive then please select the ‘Prefer not to answer’ response. Please be reassured that your own individual responses will not be shared with any researchers in a way which could identify you.

We are interested in people’s alcohol use over the course of their lifetime. Many people who used to drink alcohol no longer do for various reasons, so we would like to know about past experiences of drinking alcohol as well as current experiences.

We would like to know about your usual habits in relation to drinking alcohol please. So if you have only given up drinking alcohol temporarily and intend to return to drinking, please think about your typical/usual alcohol use when completing the questions in this section.

No thank you. We are interested in your experience of smoking or ingesting cannabis, the drug that contains both CBD and other chemicals (such as THC), in your life.

UK Biobank does not pass information along to police or other authorities, and your own individual responses will not be shared with any researchers in a way which could identify you. Use of cannabis is very common, but scientists still do not fully understand the connections between this and people’s mental and physical wellbeing over a lifetime. By answering this honestly, you could be safely contributing to this research. However, if you do not feel comfortable then please choose the option ‘Prefer not to answer’ when answering questions in this section.

Please tell us if you have EVER felt this way at any point in your life. However, it can be troubling to think back over those times. If you feel upset, or you feel like this at the current time, we would encourage you to talk to someone about this. See the support section for a list of contact details for relevant support services.  

Yes, please; we are interested in any period of low weight in your life during which your weight was low due to changes in your eating behaviour and/or physical activity.

Some people may experience several periods of low weight during their life. If so, please try to focus on the period that you experienced as the most severe or on the period that may have hindered you the most in going about your daily activities, for example, going to school or university, working, meeting friends or taking part in social activities.

Your low weight may have lowered your body’s ability to fight infections, weakened your bones, altered or stopped your periods (if applicable), or led to problems getting pregnant (if applicable). You may also have had problems with low blood pressure or fainting. Sometimes, someone’s weight can get so low that they need additional nutritional supplements or hospital treatment to be re-nourished.

Yes, we are interested in any kind of way that you restrict or have restricted your food intake to control your body weight and/or shape – this may include excessive intermittent fasting.

No, not in this context. Please do not include in your answers fasting as a religious or spiritual ritual (for example, during Ramadan, Yom Kippur, Tisha B’av, Fast of Esther, Tzom Gedalia, the Seventeenth of Tamuz, the Tenth of Tevet, Lent, Great Lent, Nativity Fast, the Apostles Fast or the Dormition Fast).

A person’s self-worth can be dependent on many different factors. Here, we are interested in finding out how strongly your self-worth depends on how much you weigh or how you look.

These questions are designed to measure disorders and symptoms that can come and go. Here, researchers need to know whether different symptoms appeared together. Symptoms occurring together may suggest a different diagnosis to the same symptoms also occurring but at different times. Please have a look at the time period that the question is referring to and answer as well as you can remember. If you always felt or did the same, giving the same answer on multiple questions is fine.

While we appreciate that providing a response for a single snapshot in time may not fully reflect your experience in general or how any issues you might have change over time, the authors of this question have designed it to capture general quality of life on a single day. The scale that these questions are part of has already been used by countless research and clinical studies in this form, including in UK Biobank.

Research into COVID-19 can take multiple approaches. We are very grateful that you took the time to take part in the UK Biobank antibody studies. The COVID-19 questions in this questionnaire are different in that they explore your COVID-19 experience from the start of the pandemic to the present day, not just times when you have tested positive on antibody tests.

This information could add extra dimensions to the data we already hold about COVID-19 for you. We would be very grateful if you could complete this section of the questionnaire as fully and accurately as possible; your responses will be extremely useful to researchers carrying out research into the pandemic.

Lots of aspects of life have changed over the past few years and we know that some people have struggled to resume some of the activities that they used to do before the COVID-19 pandemic. We are interested in this change so please tell us how things are for you now.

This refers to whether you agree with or understand the people around you.

Any comments you leave will not be systematically reviewed. If you would like to tell us something that requires our immediate attention or action from us, please call our Participant Resource Centre on 0800 0 276 276 (Monday to Friday 9am-5pm).

Any information you provide will be saved and could be evaluated by researchers in the future (for example, using techniques such as ’natural language processing’). However, UK Biobank does not currently have the resources to undertake this analysis.

• SANE

• No Panic
• NHS website

• The Survivors Trust (sexual violence)
• National Domestic Abuse Helpline (domestic violence against women and children)
•  Men’s Advice Line (domestic violence against men)
• Victim Support (other crime and violence)  
• Combat Stress (military veterans)

• Drink Aware (alcohol)
• Drinkline, the national alcohol helpline (tel: 0300 12 31 110) 
•  Talk to Frank (drugs and alcohol)

• Harmless
• The Calm Zone (men)
• Samaritans

• Beat Eating Disorders

• MIND bereavement support
• Cruse Bereavement Support

• Age UK ‘Feeling Lonely?’
• British Red Cross
• The Silver Line (over 55s)