Re-examining the relationship between education and adult mental health in the UK: A research note

Previous studies using variation in education arising from compulsory schooling laws have found no causal effects of education on mental health in the UK. We re-examine the relationship between education and mental health in the UK by taking a different approach: sibling fixed-effects with controls for polygenic scores (summary measures of genetic predisposition) for educational attainment and adult depressive symptoms. We find that higher educational attainment is associated with better adult mental health, that sibling controls reduce these associations by ~40–70% but important associations remain and find evidence for non-monotonic effects. We also find suggestive evidence that education partially “rescues” genetic predictors of poor mental health.