Evaluating health is very complex. How people evaluate their state of health depends on what aspects of health they are asked about. Should they describe their state of health ‘in general’? Or should they say whether or not they think they are the correct weight? Whether they occasionally feel unwell or have depression? Furthermore, in an overall assessment of health, aspects such as age, gender, family situation, financial situation and perception of own social status also play a role. In this section, we describe young people in Luxembourg’s subjective perception of their own health.

Nearly 35% of all students and young adults in Luxembourg rate their general state of health as being excellent. However, if you dig down into the details, there are differences: children predominantly rate their health as being very good, and thus significantly higher than adolescents and young adults. The same applies for mental health, i.e. mental illness and depression: children complain of such issues less frequently than adolescents and young adults. Growing up is a turbulent and exhausting affair. In this section, we also describe these differentiated differences for other aspects of health (such as body weight or psychosomatic illnesses) and thus try to do justice to the complexity of ‘health perception’ as a topic.