The Instituto de la Juventud (INJUVE) includes for the first time an indicator linked to the health and emotional well-being of young people and will implement a series of measures to address their emotional problems
16/03/2021.- The Interdisciplinary Research Network for the Promotion of Mental Health and Emotional Well-being in Young People (PROEM Network), led by the University of Jaén (UJA), has actively collaborated in the preparation of the ‘Youth in Spain 2020 Report‘. This document has been prepared by the Instituto de la Juventud (INJUVE) of the Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 as a general x-ray of the situation of young Spaniards based on reliable and representative data.
The objective of this report is to serve as a basis for the design of public youth policies that are now more urgent than ever due to the impact of the pandemic. Specifically, a representative sample of 6,467 young people between the ages of 15 and 29 living in Spain were questioned on issues such as education, employment, emancipation, interests and attitudes towards leisure, sexuality, gender equality and climate change, as well as the effect that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on their lives.
Luis Joaquín García, Professor of Psychology at the University of Jaén and head of the PROEM Network, initiated contacts with the previous INJUVE team led by Ruth Carrasco. Subsequently, after the arrival of its current General Director, Mª Teresa Pérez, this close collaboration was maintained in different projects. The role of the PROEM Network in this Report has been “on the one hand, to advise on the inclusion of an indicator of emotional health and well-being that had not been taken into account in previous Reports, and on the other hand, to contribute to the definition of the construct of emotional health and well-being and to advise on the implementation of measures to assess the emotional state of young people,” says Luis Joaquín García, who has coordinated this advice together with Miguel Hernández University professor José Antonio Piqueras. This work has been acknowledged in the Report in the Acknowledgements section.
The conclusions of the ‘Youth in Spain 2020 Report’ ratify the consequences of the so-called ‘lost decade’ of a generation of young people facing their second major economic and social crisis when they had not yet recovered from the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. In the field of mental health, the Report analyzes the psychological impact of the pandemic and, above all, of confinement, which has affected up to 32% of Spanish youth, this impact being much more intense among women than among men. As stated in the PROEM Network Report, “there is no future without emotionally healthy adolescents”. Therefore, it is essential to invest in evidence-based prevention and intervention protocols, particularly for the population at risk of developing emotional problems.
Likewise, the general director of INJUVE, Mª Teresa Pérez, highlights that the report describes young people as “supportive, non-conformist, open, inclusive, participative, aware of the inequalities and discrimination that exist in our society and prepared to take on the challenges and changes needed in the fields of education, digitalization, ecological transition or the eradication of sexism and its violence”.
Belén Díez, Luis Joaquín García, José Antonio Piqueras, José Antonio Muela and Lourdes Espinosa.
