Understanding the Mental Health of High School Students: A Question of Indicators

This article describes the state of mental health among adolescents in France, based on the data from the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) study for 2014. Based on current life satisfaction (the Cantril Self Anchoring Striving scale) and the ability to project oneself in the future (the Anticipated Cantril Scale) an indicator of mental health was constructed based on three categories (well-being, psychological ill-being and an intermediate state). Our analysis compares this aggregate indicator with different physical and psychological symptoms measured in the study, to try and better characterise the mental health states of adolescence.