Mental Health and Well-being at Work: A Review of the Scales to Its Measurement

Edgar Ramirez-Schneider, Alejandro Rodriguez-Valenzuela, Martín Restrepo-Jaramillo, Jose Luis Oliveros-Castro1, Francisco Palencia-Sánchez, Martha Riaño-Casallas

Research output: Working paperPreprint

Abstract

Introduction: Mental health has traditionally been defined as the absence of psychopathology, categorizing patients as sick, or, if no clear mental health disorder is found, they are assumed to be healthy individuals. Mental health from a positive perspective it defines as the optimal-functioning state of the person, the definition of optimal being different for each theorist who has conceptualized the subject; however, its main characteristic and differential factor is that mental health is something additional to just the absence of disease. Background: Mental health has become more important in the workplace recently due to its relationship with performance during work activities. A worker spends most of his time at work, sleeping is the only activity in which a human spends more time, the lack of attention that has been given to the issue of mental health at the workplace has led to the existence of poor job engagement and consequently, a decrease in the productivity of the employees globally in multiple job scenarios. Methodology: A review of the literature was carried out to find the different instruments for screening and measuring mental health at the workplace, to characterize and compare the different tests and scales found, and thus, identify the validity that they have regarding work. Results: Based on the literature reviewed, the main characteristics, advantages, and disadvantages of five well-being and positive mental health scales were determined. Subsequently, an analysis was carried out using a comparative table that included these tools to find the one with the highest validation and applicability. Analysis: The definition of mental health has changed over the years, commonly focusing on a negative perspective and clinical normality - that, certainly, remains active within the hospital environment -, to subsequently arrive at a positive perspective. Conclusion: Throughout our research, different scales were found used to measure positive mental health, unlike what has been done traditionally, which is to measure psychopathology and its distinct stages. However, when comparing the different scales considered, we could conclude that there is not enough information to decide on only one of them, due to the lack of validation in scenarios like middle-income countries, in addition to being unrelated to work environments since these scales were not designed precisely to perform screening at a workplace.
Original languageEnglish
DOIs
StatePublished - 30 Sep 2022

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