How ‘mental health smart’ are you? Analysis of responses to an Australian Broadcasting Corporation News website quiz

ABSTRACT

Background: In Australia, 7.3 million people aged between 16 and 85 years of age will have a mental disorder during their lifetime and mental health knowledge can improve their long-term outcomes.

Objective: This research examines the knowledge that the Australian public has about mental health and its associations with mental health training, personal experience, age and gender.

Method: Data analyses were conducted on 16,783 (64% female) completed ‘How “mental health smart” are you?’ questionnaires from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation News website. Descriptive analyses were conducted, including examination of proportions of correct responses and multivariate logistic regression.

Results: The descriptive analyses showed knowledge about depression was highest, while knowledge about anxiety and psychosis were lowest. People who reported experience with their own or friends/family mental health problems had higher odds of answering correctly, as did people who had completed any mental health training.

Discussion: Insights in these areas could be used to target future interventions, including increased public awareness campaigns for mental illnesses with lower public health knowledge such as psychosis and anxiety. The results of this study support an increase in the availability of mental health training such as the Mental Health First Aid course to the Australian public.

KEYWORDS:

• Mental health
• mental health literacy
• public health awareness
• mental health training

Acknowledgements

We thank Cathy Johnson, Claudine Ryan, Matthew Liddy and Simon Elvery for their contribution to the development of the questionnaire which this work was based on. We thank the Australian Broadcasting Network for making data from the questionnaire available to the researchers and we are also grateful to the participants who completed the questionnaire.

Disclosure statement

Anthony Jorm is a co-founder of Mental Health First Aid training and Chair of the board of Mental Health First Aid International.

ORCID

Tessa L. Cutler http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0999-7532

Nicola J. Reavley http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5513-8291

Anthony F. Jorm http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1424-4116