Whether a person experiences feelings of anxiety or despression is derived from a score of 76 or lower in people aged 12 years or older on the Mental Health Inventory (MHI-5) for adolescents and adults.

The MHI-5 is an international standard for measuring mental health, and consists of 5 questions. The MHI-5 is a scale of the Short Format 36 or SF-36, a detailed international standard for measuring health. The MHI-5 includes questions that relate to how the respondent has felt over the past four weeks. Those questions are put to respondents 12 years of age or older.

The questions were:

1. Have you felt very anxious?
2. Have you felt so unhappy that nothing could cheer you up?
3. Have you felt calm and relaxed?
4. Have you felt sad and down-hearted?
5. Have you felt happy?

For each question there are six different options: all the time, most of the time, often, sometimes, seldom and never. For the positively formulated questions in the MHI-5 questionnaire (questions 3 and 5), the value scale applied was 5, 4, 3, 2, 1 and 0 respectively. For the negatively formulated questions (questions 1, 2 and 4), the scale was reversed. Then, simple total scores were calculated for each respondent and multiplied by 4, so that a respondent’s score could range between zero and 100, with a lower score indicating more feelings of depression.