Young people don’t know enough about offers of help

On average, children and young people in Austria spend three and a half hours a day glued to their smartphones and surfing the Internet. There is a lot on offer there, but support for mental well-being is rarely included. In a survey, more than half said they had never seen an online offer of help on the topic of suicide.

The survey of more than 8,000 children and young people with an average age of 14 years presented yesterday showed that mental health is an issue. 74 percent said that they were satisfied with their life, but 67 percent said that they had felt melancholy or hopeless on at least a few days in the past two weeks, and even 27 percent said that they had also thought about it would rather be dead or cause harm to themselves.

Children and young people should be given more support in learning to talk about negative feelings, said Golli Marboe, the initiator of the study and the “Mental Health Days” in school lessons. Marboe’s son committed suicide five years ago. “Since then we have asked ourselves again and again, what did we miss, what could we have done better, why didn’t we recognize that he wasn’t just in a bad mood, but had a serious illness,” said Marboe. The journalist and author founded the “Mental Health Days” initiative to make the topic more visible and “so that we learn to talk about our feelings.” 681 modules have already been held. For Marboe, it would be a great wish to establish a fixed mental health day in Austrian schools.

Info at www.mentalhealthdays.eu

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