New Zealanders' mental wellbeing is declining with more people feeling lonely.
Photo: Marika Khabazi
Stats NZ has released its 2021 Wellbeing Statistics, which gives a picture of social wellbeing in the population.
Eighty-one percent of the population aged 15 and over were satisfied with their lives - unchanged from the last survey in 2018.
However, mental wellbeing has declined with more than 28 percent of the population reporting poor mental wellbeing - an increase of almost five percentage points.
This change was mainly among those aged 25 to 44.
Loneliness levels also increased, with women more likely to feel lonely than men "at least a little of the time".
Both face-to-face and non-face-to-face contact with family increased but face-to-face contact with friends decreased.
Wellbeing principal analyst Dr Claire Bretherton said the survey figures showed "a lot" about what you might expect to see during a pandemic.
With some of the figures being, like life satisfaction, being unchanged from 2018, she said smaller quarterly studies the organisation had done through the pandemic showed people were resilient.
People in the survey were asked the WHO-5, a series of positively worded questions from the World Health Organisation.
The five questions were whether in the past two weeks people felt all or most of the time: cheerful and in good spirits, calm and relaxed, active and vigorous, fresh and rested, and life filled with interesting things.
All measures were down in 2021 from 2018.
When broken down into demographic groups, LGBT+ person, sole parents, disabled persons aged 15 to 64, female and Māori had poorer mental wellbeing than the general population.
In contrast, males, those living rurally, aged 65 to 74, recent migrants, and the Taranaki region had better mental wellbeing than the general population.
Bretherton confirmed there was diversity within the study, including ethnically, and around gender and sexuality.
However, some of demographic data - like non-binary persons, for example - could be suppressed because of the proportion included in the study.
Wellbeing and housing design analyst Dr Ben Atkins said there was a reduced sample size of 3500 rather than the goal of 8500 because of the Delta outbreak in August 2021 that stopped Stats NZ being able to conduct interviews.
The organisation was "very happy" with the data and that it was still representative of the total population.