A pioneering program will track mental and physical health from adolescence to adulthood
- From 14 to 25, a program analyzes for the first time the living habits, stressful situations and self-image of some 4,000 young people. Araba and Navarra will participate to better understand what factors and how they influence anxiety, depression or eating disorders.
The project will analyze the feeding of young people, physical exercise, alcohol and drug use, the use of video games and internet, the stressful situations they live, self-image... The questionnaires will be answered in the educational centers themselves by the volunteer students of the ESO and will participate many professionals in the evaluation of the information: pediatricians, primary care physicians, psychiatrists, psychologists, specialists…
The objective is to design and implement preventive actions to influence unhealthy habits and improve physical and mental health with the information and conclusions obtained.
"Nobody understands me."
Program members emphasize that adolescents are in full physical and mental development and are more at risk of mental or personality disorders, as well as attempting suicide. In short, “adolescence is a very delicate and hard stage, it changes the relationship with the parents we had as a reference, friends, emotions are out of control... and for adults the problems are other, related to work, etc., but we must understand that young people can feel marginalized, that nobody understands or takes them into account, and that in addition the personal problem is always important for oneself”, stressed Leire or the psychologist. “There is a prejudice like childhood and youth as a happy, conflict-free era, and I think it’s the trap we make adults, as if adults suffer alone,” said psychiatrist Idoia Agirre, at the same time.
"For adults we are crystal clear and weak, because we accept as a generation that we are not well, because we denounce how we feel"
Isn't there sadness on social media?
In both diet and exercise, the program has detected the loss of healthy habits. Project professionals have also warned that the abusive use of social networks is becoming more widespread. In fact, there has been talk on more than one occasion about the influence of inappropriate use of social networks on mental and physical health. They said so in the Colloquium: “On social media, we tend to imagine that everything is perfect, as if sadness doesn’t exist, and turning negative emotions into invisible is a big problem. Because everyday life is not extreme: not being very sad, not that joy and perfection in social networks. Having breakfast, going to work, taking the bus, getting bored... and compared to social media images, I can feel that my life is not so good.”
The reality is that mental health has taken the public square and there is increasing freedom of speech on the subject, although it has not ceased to be taboo, and this achievement is largely that of young people. Elena suffered a depression that told us: “They call us glass generation because adults look at us with the needs they had when they were young, and the situation is not the same. For them, we are crystal clear and weak, because we accept as a generation that we are not well, because we denounce how we feel. It seems to me that we are doing a very good job, denouncing all this, because not having been denounced by the generation of our parents does not mean that it did not exist. We are able to say ‘look, this happens to me, this is a reality and it is a problem, the system is not willing to face it’.
Mental health will be the world's leading public health problem by 2030, according to the World Health Organization. One billion people suffer from some mental disorder in the world. One in five children and adolescents suffers from a diagnosed mental disorder.
