Health of Mind and Bodymainly true of mental illness. It is widely believed that men-
tal illness is harder to adapt to than physical illness (other
than chronic pain) because of the way in which it fills the
mind.^22
Determinants of Ill Health
We turn now to the determinants of ill health, focusing on
the middle- aged people in the BCS (see Table 6.5). Inter-
estingly the key determinants are very similar for physical
and mental illness. Emotional health in childhood reduces
adult illness, physical as well as mental, and so (though less
so) does good conduct in childhood. Only intellectual per-
formance has no effect on the number of physical health
problems one experiences. (It does reduce the reporting of
symptoms of mental illness.)
Turning to the measured influence of parents, neither
their education nor their income affect the physical health
of their adult offspring. But their mother’s mental health
has a real effect on both their physical and mental health.
Father’s unemployment is also a strongly adverse factor.
Clearly parents have a large effect through the genes they
transmit to their offspring,^23 but we are not able to measure
this in these surveys.
More broadly, there is a two- way interaction between
happiness and health throughout life. Healthy people
are happier, and happy people live longer. This has been
known for many years and was made famous through the
Nuns Study, which showed that among nuns (who tend to
have similar lifestyles) those who were positive in spirit at
around age 18 lived much longer than those who were more