WHO-5 Wellbeing Self-Check

About the WHO-5

The WHO-5 was introduced by the World Health Organization’s Collaborating Centre in Mental Health in 1998 and has since been validated in dozens of languages and hundreds of studies. Its five positively phrased items cover mood, calm, energy, rest, and interest over the past two weeks. The raw score (0-25) is multiplied by 4 to give a 0-100 wellbeing index; an index below 50 suggests low wellbeing and possible depression worth screening for.

How scores are interpreted

Score	What it suggests
0–12	Low Wellbeing — Screening Recommended
13–17	Below-Average Wellbeing
18–25	Good Wellbeing

Source & license: Topp, C. W., Østergaard, S. D., Søndergaard, S., & Bech, P. (2015). The WHO-5 Well-Being Index: A systematic review of the literature. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 84(3), 167–176. The WHO-5 (WHO, 1998) is free to use with citation.

When to seek professional help

If your wellbeing has been low for more than two weeks, or if low scores come with sadness, hopelessness, or loss of interest, consider a depression screen and a conversation with a professional. If your screening results suggest you may benefit from professional support, our licensed therapists serve clients in person in Bentonville and via telehealth throughout Arkansas. Call (479) 259-1390 or book a free 15-minute consultation.

What this wellbeing screener measures

The five questions you just answered come from the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, a brief tool built around positive experience rather than symptoms. Instead of asking how often you have felt low or anxious, it asks how often, over the past two weeks, you have felt cheerful, calm and relaxed, active and energetic, rested when you woke, and interested in daily life. Each item is rated from "at no time" (0) to "all of the time" (5), so the raw total runs from 0 to 25; multiplying by 4 places your result on a familiar 0-100 wellbeing scale.

Measuring wellbeing this way matters because emotional health is more than the absence of a disorder. A person can be free of any diagnosable condition and still feel flat, depleted, or disconnected — and, conversely, someone managing a longstanding condition can still experience real cheerfulness, rest, and engagement. The five domains the WHO-5 touches map onto things most people recognize in everyday life: mood (do you feel in good spirits?), calm (is your nervous system settled, or running hot?), vitality (do you have energy for the things you care about?), restoration (does sleep actually leave you refreshed?), and interest (are you curious and engaged, or going through the motions?). Looking at all five together gives a fuller picture than any single one alone.

Because the index leans toward positive states, a low score is not automatically a sign of illness — it may simply reflect a hard stretch: grief, a demanding season at work, caregiving strain, a move, a new baby, or the ordinary wear of chronic stress. What the screener does well is give that experience a number you can track over time, which makes it easier to notice whether things are slowly improving, holding steady, or quietly drifting downward.

How to understand your results

Please read your number as a snapshot, not a verdict. The WHO-5 is a screening tool — a structured way to put language and a score to how you have been feeling lately. It is not a diagnosis. Only a licensed clinician who talks with you, hears your history, and considers your context can determine whether something like depression, an anxiety condition, or burnout is present. A questionnaire cannot see the whole of your life, and two people with the same score can be in very different situations.

As a general guide, a 0-100 index below 50 (a raw score of 12 or under) is often used as a cue to look more closely at mood, and may warrant a fuller depression screen. A higher score suggests your recent experience of wellbeing has been relatively good. But scores live in context. A 56 during a calm month and a 56 in the middle of a crisis mean different things. So does a steady 70 versus a 70 that has been sliding down from 85 over several months. The most useful question is not only "what is my number?" but "what direction has it been moving, and for how long?"

It also helps to notice which items pulled your score down. Low marks clustered on rest and energy point in a different practical direction than low marks on mood and interest. The first pattern often responds to sleep, recovery, and load management; the second is more characteristic of the low, flat states seen in depression. Neither pattern tells you what is "wrong" on its own, but both are useful to bring into a conversation with a professional, who can help you separate ordinary stress from something that deserves more focused support. For background on how clinicians think about depression and mood, the National Institute of Mental Health offers plain-language information at nimh.nih.gov, and the American Psychological Association maintains general resources on psychotherapy at apa.org.

One more note on interpretation: a single low result on a single day is not a reason to panic, and a single good result is not a reason to ignore a problem you know is there. If your lived experience and your score disagree, trust that you know your own life — and let the screener be a starting point for a real conversation rather than the final word.

What to do next

Whatever your score, you do not have to interpret it alone — and you do not need a "bad enough" result to be worth talking to someone. Many people come to therapy not in crisis but simply because life has felt heavier, smaller, or more tiring than they want it to. A free 15-minute consultation is a low-pressure way to share what the screener surfaced, ask questions, and decide together whether ongoing support makes sense. There is no obligation to continue.

At ZipHealthy, support is delivered by licensed clinical social workers (LCSWs) through talk-based psychotherapy and counseling. Our downtown Bentonville clinicians focus on behavioral health, so we don't diagnose physical conditions or manage medication. If your wellbeing concerns may have a medical contributor — for example, sleep, thyroid, or other health factors that can affect mood and energy — or if medication might be worth considering, we coordinate with your primary care provider or a prescriber so the whole picture is addressed. Our role is the talking, skills, and processing side of care.

If you would like to take that next step, you can book a free consultation online or call us at (479) 259-1390. We offer in-person sessions in Bentonville and telehealth across Arkansas, and we are glad to walk you through pricing and what to expect or provide a good-faith estimate before anything begins.

Depending on what you are noticing, different formats can help. Individual therapy offers focused one-on-one work; a therapy group or our DBT skills group can build practical tools for managing stress and emotion alongside others working on similar goals. If your low wellbeing is tangled up with worry or low mood, our pages on anxiety treatment and depression therapy describe how we approach each, and EMDR therapy may be relevant if past experiences are still weighing on the present. You can also browse the full range of our behavioral health services to see what fits.

Related self-checks and resources

Wellbeing rarely sits in one neat box, so it can be helpful to look at the areas a low score most often touches. A low WHO-5 result frequently overlaps with stress overload, exhaustion, or low mood — and each of those has its own short, confidential self-check:

None of these screeners is a diagnosis, and taking more than one does not "add up" to one — they simply help you and a clinician see patterns more clearly. When you are ready to talk it through, our individual therapy and statewide telehealth are here, and you can always start with a no-cost conversation by calling (479) 259-1390 or booking a free consultation.

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