Mental Health: Awareness
Understand what mental health means, what's possible, and where you stand. About 15 minutes.
Mental health shapes how you think, feel, and act in daily life. It influences your decision-making, your relationships, your physical health, and your capacity to handle stress. The effects are measurable and far-reaching.
Depression increases cardiovascular disease risk by 20 – 40%, whilst chronic physical conditions raise depression risk in turn. About 1 in 3 adults report feeling lonely, and loneliness is linked to increased risks of heart disease, stroke, and premature mortality.
The workplace effects are substantial: the WHO estimates that 12 billion working days are lost annually to depression and anxiety, costing the global economy $1 trillion per year. And 76% of workers report experiencing mental health symptoms, with 84% saying workplace conditions contributed.
The good news is that mental health responds to intervention. Evidence-based therapies, self-management practices, and lifestyle changes all produce measurable improvements – and many of the highest-impact approaches are accessible without specialist referral.
People approach mental health for different reasons. This site scores every mental health intervention across three core values. Later, you'll set your own weighting across these three values, and the site will rank interventions by how well they deliver on the things you actually care about.
Professional Treatment & Support
Working with qualified mental health professionals and building strong support networks. Therapy, counselling, medication when appropriate, and leveraging relationships for mental health support. People who lean towards this value focus on expert guidance and community-based approaches to mental wellness.
Self-Management & Independence
Developing personal skills and practices to manage your own mental health independently. Mindfulness, journalling, exercise, and other self-directed interventions that build internal capabilities. People who lean towards this value focus on self-reliance and building their own emotional toolkit.
Integration & Holistic Approach
Viewing mental health as interconnected with all other life areas and addressing it through lifestyle, relationships, purpose, and environment. People who lean towards this value see mental wellness as emerging from overall life balance and meaning, and would pursue it even if they had no specific symptoms to address.
The Top 0.1% band represents roughly 1 in 1,000 people. To give you a sense of what that looks like for each mental health value:
Stephen Fry has spoken and written extensively about living with bipolar disorder over several decades, including periods of hospitalisation and suicidal ideation. He has maintained ongoing professional treatment throughout, and his documentary The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive documented his relationship with psychiatry in detail. He appears to use professional support as a sustained foundation for functioning at a high level across multiple careers.
Phil Stutz, the psychotherapist featured in the Netflix documentary Stutz, has managed Parkinson's disease, chronic pain, and depression throughout his career using a structured set of self-directed practices he developed over decades. His approach centres on daily internal exercises – visualisation, body awareness, and emotional regulation routines – which he reportedly practises himself, making him an unusually visible example of a practitioner who lives his own methods.
Johann Hari, after researching and writing Lost Connections, restructured his own life around the social and environmental contributors to depression he had identified – changing his work patterns, investing in community, and redesigning his daily routines around connection and purpose. He has discussed publicly how these lifestyle changes, alongside professional treatment, produced more lasting improvements than medication alone had done for him.
Professional Treatment & Support
Self-Management & Independence
Integration & Holistic Approach
Your estimated position
Percentiles are estimates based on published population data on mental health engagement among adults. Items without a clear ordinal scale are left unscored.
You now understand why mental health matters, what different people get out of it, what's achievable, and where you currently stand. The final step is to set your personal value weightings and see which interventions are the best fit for you.
On the interventions page, adjust the sliders to reflect how much you care about professional support, self-management, and holistic integration. The table will re-rank interventions to match your priorities.
Awareness assessment complete
You've built your foundation in Mental Health. Your self-assessment and value weightings are saved.
View Your Interventions