ERYICA, in collaboration with the Council of Europe, organized this webinar aimed primarily at young people, youth workers, as well as health and education professionals.
05/12/2022.- Luis Joaquín García, Professor of Psychology at the University of Jaén (UJA), presented the initiative to promote emotional well-being in adolescents DAREMOS at the webinar “Do you kNOw distress? – Youth information responses to mental health”, organized by the European Youth Information and Counselling Agency (ERYICA), in collaboration with the Council of Europe.
The event, aimed at young people, youth workers, as well as education and health professionals and the general public, provided information on the impact of the pandemic on the health and emotional well-being of young people through the vision of specialists in child and youth mental health and other disciplines; and allowed to hear and value the point of view of young people on this issue.
Luis Joaquín García gave the opening lecture of the webinar, analyzing the mental health needs of young people and delving into successful actions carried out to improve this situation. In his presentation, he broke down the keys of the initiatives to promote emotional well-being in adolescents and young people that UJA has led in recent years: DAREMOS, PROCARE, PROADEMO and DIGITAS, and national projects such as BIG HUG and international projects such as Level UP, in which his team participates.
Luis Joaquín García emphasized the objectives of these SIX projects and the results obtained in some of them. In this regard, he stressed that “DAREMOS is composed of an interdisciplinary team (Psychology, Corpus Linguistics, Big Data and Epigenetics) to advance in the early detection of adolescents at risk of developing emotional difficulties”.
In turn, he stressed that “the findings of DAREMOS have contributed to provide professionals in education, health and youth work with tools to identify emotionally healthy adolescents, at-risk and high-risk youth”.
DAREMOS is a worldwide pioneering initiative in which Luis Joaquín García, Lourdes Espinosa, José Antonio Muela and Mª Belén Díez from the University of Jaén, and Mª Jesús Pinto and Juan Miguel Gómez from the Institute of Biomedical Research of Málaga (IBIMA), together with Arturo Montejo from the UJA spin-off, YottaCode, have participated. It is a project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation that has an External Advisory Board formed by the Spanish Youth Institute (INJUVE) of the Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030, the Spanish Association of Mutual Help against Social Phobia and Anxiety Disorders (AMTAES), the Confederación de Organizaciones de Psicopedagogía y Orientación de España (COPOE), the Consejo de la Juventud de España (CJE) and the Youth group of the Federación Estatal de Lesbianas, Gais, Trans, Bisexuales, Intersexuales y más (FELGTBI+).
The day also included a presentation by Eva Reina, Director of ERYICA; an interview by Maria Fsadni, member of ERYICA’s Youth Ambassadors Commission, with Anna Knobbout, member of the Advisory Council on Youth; and presentations by Anna Nesladek and Angelina Pereira, ERYICA technical staff. Also, examples of good practices in youth information services and other related sectors were presented through the testimonies of: Chara Spyropoulou (IASIS NGO, Greece), Patricia Venâncio (ANIJ, Luxembourg) and Silvia Solà and Mariona Altimira (Castellterçol City Council, Spain).
