Socioeconomic Inequalities in Mental Health of Adult Population: Serbian National Health Survey

Abstract

Background: The global burden of mental disorders is rising. In Serbia, anxiety is the leading cause of disabili-ty-adjusted life years. Serbia has no mental health survey at the population level. The information on prevalence of mental disorders and related socioeconomic inequalities are valuable for mental care improvement. Aims: ?? explore the prevalence of mental health disorders and socioeconomic inequalities in mental health of adult Serbian population, and to explore whether age years and employment status interact with mental health in urban and rural settlements. Study Design: Cross-sectional study.Methods: This study is an additional analysis of Ser-bian Health Survey 2006 that was carried out with stan-dardized household questionnaires at the representative sample of 7673 randomly selected households - 15563 adults. The response rate was 93%. A multivariate lo-gistic regression modeling highlighted the predictors of the 5 item Mental Health Inventory (MHI-5), and of chronic anxiety or depression within eight independent variables (age, gender, type of settlement, marital sta-tus and self-perceived health, education, employment status and Wealth Index). The significance level in descriptive statistics, chi square analysis and bivariate and multivariate logistic regressions was set at p