Universal Preventive Resilience Intervention to Improve and Promote Mental Health for Teenagers

Overview

Adolescence is a period of many physical, mental, emotional, and social changes. It is also associated with risk behaviour conducts. Nonetheless, not all youths under disadvantage, adversity, or exposure to risk factors experience negative mental health outcomes. The concept of RESILIENCE provides one possible explanation for the ability of some individuals to maintain positive mental health. Resilience is thus the ability of an individual or community to adapt to life challenges or adversities while maintaining mental health and well-being. The increasing prevalence of mental disorders amongst children (around 10-20% of young people) makes positive mental health promotion in schools necessary through intervention programmes. UPRIGHT (Universal Preventive Resilience Intervention Globally implemented in schools to improve and promote mental Health for Teenagers) is a research and innovation project funded by the European Union´s Horizon 2020 programme (No. 754919). UPRIGHT general aim is to promote mental well-being and prevent mental disorders in youth by enhancing resilience capacities. It has been designed as a whole school approach addressing early adolescents, their families and the school community to finally create a real mental well-being culture at schools.

The operational objectives of UPRIGHT are: * to co-create (involving adolescents, families, school staff, clinicians, policy makers) an innovative resilience holistic program in schools for the promotion of mental health in youth between 12 and 14 years; * to deploy an intervention in five different pan-European regions; * to better understand the natural history of mental disorders according to the resilience level and provide evidence of specific resilience factors promoting positive mental well-being longitudinally; * to demonstrate the effectiveness and predict future impact of an intervention in terms of improvement of quality of life, mental well-being, and academic performance, and a reduction of absenteeism and bullying cases; * to transfer the programme to Europe and beyond by disseminating the results and enabling innovative action plans for mental well-being in the youth. The UPRIGHT programme´s conceptual framework is structured in four different domains including skills for coping, efficacy, social and emotional learning and mindfulness practice. The intervention was developed by an innovative co-creation process (co-design, co-production and co-customization) participating five European regions representative of the cultural and socioeconomic variability (Lower Silesian in Poland, Basque Country in Spain, Trento in Italy, Denmark and Reykjavik capitol area in Iceland).