The Polish adaptation of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF)

•Three dimensional structure of subjective well-being was confirmed.•Polish version of MHC-SF shows good reliability and external validity.•Mental health and mental illness are not two sides of one bipolar continuum.

The Mental Health Continuum-Short Form (MHC-SF) developed by Keyes (2009) is the tool that allows for continuous assessment of subjective well-being (including its three aspects: emotional, psychological, and social), as well as for the categorical diagnosis of the presence of mental health and the absence of mental health (understood as flourishing and languishing). This paper presents the result of the validation and psychometric parameters of the Polish MHC-SF. The participants included 2115 respondents aged 16–81 (55.6% women) from Poland. The findings confirmed the reliability of MHC-SF, external validity, three-dimensional structure of subjective well-being, and supported two-continua model of mental health, where mental health and mental illness are two related but distinguishable dimensions, not at the ends of the same continuum.