ESTUDO DA SAÚDE MENTAL POSITIVA EM JOVENS ADULTOS: RELAÇÕES ENTRE PSICOPATOLOGIA E BEM-ESTAR.

Evidence is accumulating that positive mental health is more than the absence of psychophatology and may play an important role in health outcomes (Huppert, 2005). The aim of this study is to characterize the positive mental health and mental illness of 150 young Portuguese people (18-30 years). For data collection, we use the Mental Wellness Scale Warwick-Edinburgh (Tennant et al., 2007), Continuum Health Mental Scale-Short Version (Keyes, 2002) and the Anxiety, Depression and Stress Scale (Pais-Ribeiro, Honrado & Leal, 2004). Our findings indicated that most of the sample has good levels of positive mental health and lower levels of psychopathology, and negative correlations have been found between the positive mental health and psychopathology. It was also found that are the younger and men who have higher levels of positive mental health, and are the women and the unemployed who have presented higher levels of psychopathology. These findings point the need to include measures of positive mental health and well-being in studies of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]