Question: What is the most interesting conclusion you have come to in your mental health research? And do you think bad mental health is more down to the dispositional variables or situational?

Kirsty Miller answered on 14 Jun 2017:

Hi Olivia! Great question! I think probably the number of teenagers who are suffering from mental illness! In the high-school students I studied, I found that over a third of them were suffering from psychological distress. Even worse, I found that nearly half of the girls were suffering from mental distress. I never imagined the numbers would be so high and actually found it really upsetting. It’s good that I discovered it though because it made me even more determined to try to find ways to improve teenage mental health.
In terms of dispositional vs situational, I think it’s both (as so often in psychology!). There was actually a really interesting (short!) newspaper article on this recently. It was saying that often (even in medical tv programmes), people often overlook situational factors. (Here it is if you’re interested: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/mar/01/mental-health-problems-brain-bbc-equality?CMP=share_btn_tw)
Basically though, there is often a genetic component to mental illness, meaning that you might be at higher risk of developing it, but often it takes situational factors to bring this out. Just because you’re genetically more likely to develop it, doesn’t mean you will. Likewise, you can have no genetic risk, but if you’re in an awful situation, then there’s a real possibility you might. So usually it’s a mixture of the two, but we definitely can’t ignore one or the other!
Hope this helps and let me know if you have any more questions! 🙂