The 12-item General Health Questionnaire (GHQ-12) is a self-rating questionnaire designed for detecting individuals with a diagnosable psychiatric disorder related to anxiety/depression in the previous 4 weeks. The original version had 60 items, and these were reduced to 12 items . An example of an asked question in this questionnaire is ‘Have you recently been able to enjoy your normal day-to-day activities?’ with the following possible answers: better as usual, same as usual, less than usual, much less as usual. This 12-items questionnaire is validated in several populations and languages including English, French and Spanish (internal consistency: 0.7–0.9; test–retest coefficients: 0.8; criterion-related validity: sensitivity ≥0.7, specificity >0.7, area under ROC curve ≥0.8) [14, 28]. Based on the traditional scoring system, a total score ranging from 0 to 12 was calculated by summing up the answers on the 12 items, with a score of 4 or more indicating the presence of anxiety/depression (0 for favourable answers, 1 for unfavourable answers) [14, 28].