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Cited by 169

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 10 of the 10 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Psychological Distress: Same Continuum or Distinct Phenomena?

Payton, Andrew R.·2009·Journal of Health and Social Behavior

Abstract

In this article, I argue that the relationships among mental health, disorder, and distress are a key source of conflict in the sociology of mental health and that the features of the conflict have the potential to call into question much of the accumulated scientific knowledge on mental health. To address this issue, I attempt to empirically assess three competing frameworks regarding these relationships: (1) the “modal perspective,” (2) the “Mirowsky and Ross perspective,” and (3) the “positive psychology perspective.” Results, however, support a “discontinuous perspective:” no underlying continuum among any of the three concepts. These results suggest that researchers need to avoid the common practice of “lumping together” distress, disorder, and mental health and study each in their own right. Subsequent tests attempt to further specify the relationships among these concepts. Results indicate a strong positive directional association from distress to disorder, a strong negative directional association from distress to mental health, and no significant relationship between mental health and disorder. These results are used to generate a number of directions for future research.

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Show all 10 references

Research works printed but not linked: 25

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Metadata

Authors
Payton, A. R.
Venue
Journal of Health and Social Behavior
Published
2009-06
Volume
50
Issue
2
Pages
213-227
ISSN
  • 0022-1465 (ISSN-L)
  • 2150-6000
OpenAlex
W2047990129
Cited by
169
References
10
FWCI
8.43
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Licence
journals.sagepub.com/page/policies/text-and-data-mining-license (tdm)

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Psychological Distress: Same Continuum or Distinct Phenomena? https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1177/002214650905000207
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Payton, A. R. (2009). Mental Health, Mental Illness, and Psychological Distress: Same Continuum or Distinct Phenomena? Journal of Health and Social Behavior. https://doi.org/10.1177/002214650905000207

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.