European Youth Information Day 2021
2021
European Youth Information Day 2021
Still a lot to be done on youth mental health!
There is no doubt that the campaign for the European Youth Information Day 2021 has opened a meaningful discussion on mental health and emotional well-being among young people and youth workers.
There is a global demand to bring mental health to the forefront. And young people have a lot to say about it. More than 1,800 young people from 42 different nationalities filled out the preliminary survey in which they were encouraged to give their honest testimony on how they experienced the first months of the pandemic. These testimonies, some of them quite harsh, showed that young people, above all, need to be heard.
The second part of the campaign, which ran during April 2021, was shared more than 1,000 times by ERYICA members and other organisations who joined the cause. It reached more than 170,000 impressions and was translated into 16 European languages.
Among the various reflections the campaign has brought, we found a critical demand to train youth (information) workers and to increase their mental health literacy. Many of them feel disarmed, without sufficient resources or experience to deal with these issues. They want to feel empowered, to be able to offer a more professional and complete service to young people.
