Getting a good education may not improve your life chances of happiness, according to new mental health research.

 The work used existing data from the Health Survey for England (HSE) for 2010 and 2011 in which the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) was administered to 17,030 survey participants across both years. In the paper, they examined socioeconomic factors related to high mental wellbeing, such as level of education and personal finances. Low educational attainment is strongly associated with mental illness but the research team wanted to find out if higher educational attainment is linked with mental wellbeing. 

High mental wellbeing was defined as 'feeling good and functioning well'. People with high levels of mental wellbeing manage to feel happy and contented with their lives more often than those who don't because of the way they manage problems and challenges especially in relationships with others.

The team found all levels of educational attainment had similar odds of high mental well-being.

Lead author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown of the University of Warwick said: "These findings are quite controversial because we expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing. So if low educational attainment was strongly associated with mental illness, high educational attainment would be strongly connected to mental well-being. But that is not the case."

They found high levels of mental wellbeing among Afro-Caribbeans, especially men.

"Given the well-recognized association between ethnicity and detention under the Mental Health Act and the more general associations between mental illness and ethnicity, we were very surprised to find substantially increased odds of high mental well-being among minority ethnic groups, particularly African and African-Caribbean, Indian and Pakistani groups," said Stewart-Brown.  

Correlates of high mental well-being are different from those of low mental well-being, but the latter closely mirror the correlates of mental illness. 

"Assumptions about socioeconomic determinants made in planning public mental health programs focusing on the prevention of mental illness may therefore not be applicable to programs aiming to increase mental well-being."

Citation: Sarah Stewart-Brown, Dr Preshila Chandimali Samaraweera, Dr Frances Taggart, Dr Kandala Ngianga-Bakwin and Dr Saverio Stranges, 'Socioeconomic gradients and mental health: implications for public health', British Journal of Psychiatry, March 19, 2015