How it works
What's actually behind this check-in
How Are You, Really? looks casual on purpose — but the questions underneath are the real thing. Here's what it looks at, how your answers are read, who's behind it, and where the numbers on the home page come from.
Real questions, not guesses
Your answers are read against research questionnaires that have been trusted for decades — including the DASS-21 (mood, worry and stress), a PROMIS sleep measure, the UCLA-3 loneliness scale, and established questionnaires for emotional intelligence, coping, time management, perfectionism and resilience. A psychologist would recognise every one of them. There's still no score to beat — they're here so what you get back is worth reading.
How your answers are read
Everything happens in your browser — nothing is sent to a server to work out your result. Each area is compared against typical ranges, then written back to you in plain language, strengths first. You see where things sit, what it tends to mean, and what usually helps.
What the bands mean
Results are shown as gentle bands, not raw numbers, because a single number invites comparison and can sting. A band is a snapshot of a moment and a tendency across people — never a diagnosis or a label. "Most people sit here" means roughly the middle of the range (about the 30th–70th percentile against population norms), so a mid-band result is genuinely common, not a fail.
Where the norms come from
Some of the questionnaires here were shortened so the whole check-in takes about ten minutes rather than thirty. Where that's been done, the typical ranges are adjusted for the shorter version (a standard Spearman-Brown adjustment) and treated as interim norms until we've gathered enough of our own anonymous responses to confirm them. In practice the adjustment moves a band edge by around one percentile — small, but we'd rather tell you than hide it. Every scoring choice and every line of result copy has been reviewed by a clinician.
What the research says
Australia runs one of the most thorough mental-health surveys in the world, so we don't have to guess how common this is:
- In any given year, about one in five Australians aged 16–85 (21.5%) goes through a mental disorder; across a lifetime it's two in five (42.9%).
- Of the roughly 4.3 million adults affected in a year, fewer than half (45%) see a health professional about it — so more than half get no professional support at all.
- Among people aged 16–24 it's higher still — close to two in five (38.8%) in a single year.
The point of these numbers isn't to worry you — it's that struggling is common, support is patchy, and noticing early is one of the few things genuinely within reach. Mental health is one of the more treatable problems there is.
Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics, National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, 2020–2022.
Who made this
How Are You, Really? is made by Ape Labs, an Australian studio, and was developed with clinical input to keep the questions and the wording safe and sound. It's a check-in, not a clinic — it doesn't diagnose or treat, and it isn't a substitute for talking to a professional. If anything worries you, your GP is a good place to start.
Last updated July 2026.
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