Youth Mental Health Advocacy - Mental Health for Young People

ended

As we are all witnessing, young people face many challenges in their daily lives in Europe, when it comes to making choices, relationships, education, and on top of all the situation became more complicated with the overall economic degrowth and the Covid-19 restrictions in the past two years. In our local communities there are many young people already active on different levels, and many more interested to be part of the European community. Our general approach is to create partnerships with young people, to ask what is needed, and to support them in learning and doing. From our many conversations, from our practice and different polls we implemented in the previous period - the topic of mental health stood out as a priority for young people at this moment. Youth activism is the direction they can take to raise awareness about their needs, to gather allies along the way, and to make concrete products in order to create a better environment for themselves, to feel safe, accepted, and appreciated. By doing so they may help others feel the same, especially when it comes to many mental health issues in our communities. The main tools young people will learn to use are filmmaking and multimedia, as they are some of the most powerful tools of communication in modern society, they are widely recognized as well as adaptable in its form to convey different messages to different people. These tools can be used for any level of cooperation, especially transnational, due to its accessibility via online platforms. With our approach and activities listed below, we wish to achieve that young people feel good and confident to make changes in their local communities, and to transfer the learning process, the tools, and outcomes to European level where they will also have young people as partners from other countries with whom they can share this journey and to plan together the future ones.