Mental distress is much higher among people receiving benefits than the general public

There's some uncertainty around the 'working-age public' figures, because we use someone else's survey of the general public, and it doesn't allow us to separate out people receiving benefits. But using some simple assumptions, we can show a clear comparison (see notes under figure). The main bar and % figure show my preferred estimate, the hatched area shows the results using different assumptions.

This shows that mental distress is higher among the working-age public than people receiving benefits. For symptoms of depression or anxiety according to clinically-validated screening tools, this was reported by 19% of the working-age public (in my preferred estimate) vs. 61% of people receiving benefits. For thoughts of death or self-harm, this was true for 15% of the working-age public (in my preferred estimate), vs. 43% of people receiving benefits.
General public figures: the highest part of the shaded area shows the raw figures for the general public, as shown in the earlier post. The 'preferred estimate' shows what happens if we remove UC/ESA/JSA claimants from this, using our WASD survey to estimate how common this group is among the working-age public + the prevalence of distress among them. The lowest part of the shaded area does the same thing, but excluding all working-age benefit claimants (assuming Tax Credit/Income Support/Carer's Allowance/Housing Benefit claimants have similar levels of distress to UC/ESA/HSA claimants).
Measures: 'Symptoms of depression or anxiety' refers to people with moderate/severe depression or anxiety according to the PHQ-9 (depression) or GAD-7 (anxiety) clinically-validated screening tools.
'Thoughts of death or self-harm' comes from one of the PHQ-9 items, that asked people if they had “thoughts that you would be better off dead or of hurting yourself in some way” in the past fortnight
Sources: for people receiving benefits: May-June 2022 Welfare at a (Social) Distance survey, n=1,416. For working-age public: C19PRC survey Mar-Apr 2021.
See paper for further details.
Chart: Ben Geiger, 6/3/2025Source: See Geiger et al (2025)Get the dataCreated with Datawrapper