Our research group has recently used data from the Avon Longitudinal study to discover that although psychotic experiences, depressive symptoms and anxiety symptoms are treated as separate, they may be symptoms of the same underlying mental illness. We termed this illness 'common mental distress' (Stochl et al., 2014). We did this study in ALSPAC when children were 13 years of age. We formed a 'new' variable (common mental distress) using existing measures of depressive symptoms and psychotic like experiences which we would now like to investigate further. We think it would be of benefit to identify early life risk factors (prior to the age of 13) that increase the chance that adolescents will score highly for common mental distress at age 13. We would also like to know whether adolescents who scored highly on our common mental distress variable when they were 13, continue to have mental health problems in late adolescence and early adulthood.