The catalogue can be browsed in a number of different ways depending on your interests and needs. You can search the catalogue for: (1) Mental health or wellbeing topics. For example, if you are looking for a study that has measures of depression, you could search ‘depression’. (2) Particular mental health measures. For example, if you know you are interested in the General Health Questionnaire, you could search for ‘GHQ’ or '"general health questionnaire"'. (3) Other areas of interest. This is particularly useful if you wish to examine the association between mental health and another topic you are interested in. In this case, you can use the filters on the left of the search page to filter for studies that have collected information about themes such as ‘ethnicity’, ‘diet’, ‘physical health’ or ‘education’. (4) Study design. In this case you could search for ‘birth cohort’, ‘twin’ or ‘repeat cross-sectional’ studies. (5) Study name. If you already know which study you are interested in, you can also search for the study name. Search terms can be combined to narrow the list of studies down to those which meet your needs.Awareness of mental health and wellbeing has steadily increased in recent years. Estimates of the extent and the adverse impacts of mental health problems underline the urgent need for more research to understand the causes and the consequences of mental ill health and to identify the most effective interventions. Existing longitudinal and cohort studies provide unique opportunities to answer key questions related to population mental health and wellbeing. The Catalogue of Mental Health Measures is designed to provide easy access to information about the mental health measures included in British cohort and longitudinal studies to maximise the uptake of existing data and facilitate mental health research. By providing details of the measures and studies, the Catalogue serves as a resource for researchers: (a) identifying datasets that include mental health and wellbeing measures; (b) planning harmonisation studies; (3) planning further data collection. The resource is also intended for researchers who may be less familiar with mental health or from other disciplines – demographers, economists, urbanists, linguists and others. To support these researchers, the catalogue also provides information about additional training and support for conducting longitudinal mental health research.

Information about the measures was collected primarily by searching study documentation including questionnaires, user guides and relevant journal articles. For many studies, this information was publicly available. When this was not the case, we contacted study leadership teams directly to access the documentation required to collect information about the mental health measures in the study. In order to ensure the accuracy of the information in the catalogue, we asked all studies to check that our review of the measures was accurate and complete. This catalogue would not have been possible without the study leadership teams’ collaboration and we are extremely grateful for their time and support.