What the WHO-5 measures

The WHO-5 Well-Being Index is a five-item World Health Organization questionnaire measuring general wellbeing over the past two weeks. It is a general wellbeing signal, not a diagnosis of depression or any other condition.

The WHO-5 Well-Being Index is a short, five-item questionnaire developed by the World Health Organization. Rather than screening for any single condition, it asks about positive mood, vitality, and general interest in daily life over the preceding two weeks — a broad, general snapshot of how you’ve actually been doing.

Why it’s widely used

Each of the five WHO-5 items is rated on a 0–5 scale, the raw scores are summed to a total between 0 and 25, and that total is converted to a percentage score between 0 and 100 using the official formula (the raw sum multiplied by four). That brevity is part of the point: it’s short enough to complete in a minute or two, yet it remains one of the most widely used general wellbeing screening tools internationally, appearing in research studies and, in some settings, in clinical practice as a quick way to flag when someone’s general wellbeing may be worth a closer look.

It’s important to be clear about what the WHO-5 is not. It does not diagnose depression, anxiety, or any other condition on its own. A low score is a general wellbeing signal, not a diagnosis — and where the WHO-5 is used clinically, it’s typically a trained professional who interprets the result alongside other information, not the score in isolation. That distinction is exactly why Saati frames a lower score as something worth paying attention to, rather than as a clinical finding.

How Saati uses it

Saati includes the WHO-5 as one of its Validated Measures: we reproduce its official wording unaltered, use the official scoring formula described above, and always present the result labelled “Validated Measure” in your report. That’s deliberately different from our own Saati Insights — shorter, in-house question sets on things like sleep, study habits, focus, and stress. Those are informed by general research but aren’t independently validated instruments, so Saati never blends their results with the WHO-5’s. Your report keeps the two kinds of measures clearly and separately labelled throughout — see our methodology for the full picture of how we make that distinction.

A few questions worth asking yourself

You don’t need a formal score to start noticing patterns in how the last couple of weeks have felt. It can help to ask:

• Over the last two weeks, how often have I felt genuinely cheerful or in good spirits?
• Has my daily life felt filled with things that interest me, or has it felt flat and repetitive?
• Do I generally wake up feeling rested, or has that been rare lately?

These are reflection prompts, not a scored test you can complete here — the real WHO-5, scored the official way, is part of Saati’s full assessment alongside the other measures that make up your complete picture.