Poor mental health affects all domains of life, including work, relationships and physical health. Prevalence of mental illness in the UK is increasing, with 1 in 6 people experiencing mental health problems each week. One way of tackling this mental illness epidemic is through prevention. We can achieve this by maintaining and improving people's general mental health and wellbeing, before they reach a clinical diagnosis of mental illness. In this project we are interested in identifying behaviours in ones life that can be modified to improve mental health and wellbeing.

One possible predictor of mental health is our health behaviours. For example, our diet, how much physical activity we do, how much alcohol we consume and whether or not we smoke. While this may seem intuitive, there are many gaps in the research literature. First, it is commonly thought that these behaviours influence our mental health and wellbeing, but little research has been done to assess whether this is a causal effect rather than just a correlation. In order to identify effective intervention targets, it is critically important to ensure that these are causal. We will use complementary methods, allowing us to approach our research question through a number of different lenses. If we can draw consistent results, then we will be able to obtain the strongest and most informative evidence. Second, there is little research that has looked at the nuances of these health behaviours. For example, does the length or intensity of physical activity matter when considering its effect on mental health? We will use the wealth of secondary data available to us to untangle these specific details. Third, these health behaviours do not occur in isolation, therefore, we will investigate how they work together to affect
mental health. And finally, early intervention (i.e. in childhood) is an important aspect of prevention. We will use novel methods to understand how parental health behaviours influence the child's mental health. This can inform us about whether it is better to intervene on the parents or on the child's health behaviours.