The prevention of mental illness involves identifying and modifying those characteristics and exposures of an individual that threaten their mental health – commonly referred to as risk factors. Existing categorisations of risk factors for mental illness are either limited in their scope or oversimplified in their description. As part of a large mental health workforce and service planning project, we set out to develop a more detailed and comprehensive categorisation scheme to describe risk factors for mental illness.

We conducted a rapid review of MEDLINE and Google Scholar for meta-analytic studies that examined the characteristics and exposures that typify the population with mental illness in order to identify and categorise potential risk factors.

The search uncovered 1628 relevant studies, from which 10 primary and 23 secondary categories of risk factors were identified, ranging from genetic and biomedical to psychological and sociocultural. The review revealed interesting distortions in the focus of the literature, with the majority of studies focused on a few disorders (schizophrenia, depression and neurodegenerative disorders) and genetic, psychological and physiological risks. In contrast, environmental (e.g. media exposure) and occupational (e.g. employee health) were under-represented.

The categorisation scheme developed in this paper is a step towards a more detailed taxonomy of risk factors for mental illness; this will be most useful in guiding clinicians, researchers and policy-makers in driving the prevention agenda forward.