The relationship between mental health self-efficacy and mental well-being in England, UK: A Cross-sectional study

Abstract Background. Mental well-being is an essential concept in research and public health as it is recognised as an indicator of population mental health and quality of life. Previous studies have provided evidence that general self-efficacy is positively related to mental well-being. The aim of this study is to examine whether higher help-seeking self-efficacy and higher psychological well-being self-efficacy respectively, are associated with increased mental well-being.Methods. In this cross-sectional study 1795 adults from the general English population were recruited from a market research panel to fill out an online questionnaire between 24th September 2018 and 05th October 2018. Two simple linear regression analyses were used to investigate the relationship between each of help-seeking self-efficacy and psychological well-being self- efficacy as exposure variables and mental well-being as the outcome. Multiple imputation by chained equations was used to handle missing data.Results. No evidence was found for an association between either help-seeking self-efficacy or psychological well-being self-efficacy and mental well-being.Conclusions. These findings do not provide evidence that improving help-seeking or psychological well-being self-efficacy could lead to improving well-being. Methodological limitations, such as unmeasured confounders might be responsible for the lack of evidence in this study. Having a mental health condition is a potential negative confounder that might not have been measured adequately.