FOI reference: FOI-2025-2709
You asked
Self-reported mental health conditions and symptoms (such as serious mental illness symptoms, depression, anxiety etc.), between January 2023 to present, broken down where possible daily, by ethnicity, and by Middle Super Output Area in Birmingham (or alternative indication of geographical location in Birmingham).
We said
Thank you for your request.
Unfortunately, we do not hold the exact breakdown of information you have requested. Statistical expertise would be required to action this request as we would have to:
Conduct a full assessment and quality assurance of the source data
Conduct data cleaning on the source data, derive a quarterly dataset and apply the appropriate weights
Conduct analysis based on the requirements set out in your request
Conduct a quality assessment of the findings in accordance with our quality assurance standards, including ensuring no instances of statistical disclosure are present
Obtain sign off by devolved administrations before publishing the analysis
Conduct final quality assurance of the live statistics.
As these actions would all require the application of statistical expertise and experience, involving skill and judgement, this constitutes the creation of new information, and therefore is not information accessible via FOIA.
However, our Personal Well-being in the UK release, includes breakdowns of ONS' four personal well-being measures by several demographic characteristics (including ethnicity) and local authority geographies using data from the Annual Population Survey.
As of 8 October 2024, ONS statistics produced from the Annual Population Survey are not considered accredited official statistics and are designated as official statistics in development until further review. This is as a consequence of ongoing challenges with the response rates, levels, and weighting approach of the APS. In a letter to the Office for Statistics Regulation requesting this change we outlined that these challenges impacted local authority sample sizes in particular. As a consequence of not being able to provide these disaggregated statistics, we have paused the Personal Well-being in the UK release. We intend this to be a temporary pause while we work to improve the quality of the APS to enable us to reinstate this publication in the future. During this pause, we intend to continue publishing our personal well-being estimates at a UK, country and regional level on a quarterly basis as part of the UK Measures of National Well-being. As a result, we have only produced personal well-being statistics from the APS until March 2023.
Additionally, we publish estimates of people reporting some evidence of anxiety or depression using Understanding Society (The UK Household Longitudinal Study) data. This measure is based on the General Health Questionnaire (GHQ) which asks respondents 12 questions about their recent feelings. You can see our findings in our UK Measures of National Well-being Dashboard and the accompanying data tables which include breakdowns by region. You might also find the Understanding Society well-being dashboard interesting.