Good education doesn't ensure 'a happy life'

If you are well educated, it doesn't necessarily mean that your chances of happiness in life are better than others, says a new study.

A new mental health research from the University of Warwick, 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.he team found all levels of educational attainment had similar odds of high mental well-being.

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.

Lead author Professor Sarah Stewart-Brown said that the findings were quite controversial because they had expected to find the socioeconomic factors that are associated with mental illness would also be correlated with mental wellbeing.

Professor Stewart-Brown added that given the well-recognised association between ethnicity and detention under the Mental Health Act and the more general associations between mental illness and ethnicity, they 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.

The team 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.

Professor Stewart-Brown added that the 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.

The study is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.