We celebrate the World Mental Health Day by organizing lectures for children. All the lectures, delivered by school psychologists, concern the typical problems adolescents deal with, such as managing emotions, prioritizing, rejection, peer pressure. All of them can result in serious mental problems, so school time is a proper time to develop social and emotional strategies which would help them to cope with these problems. These include: adopting a regular schedule of activities, ability to tackle problems and developing interpersonal skills. We also created a padlet with a collection of video clips, articles, lesson plans and other supplementary teaching materials as a resource for class tutors to use during the form time.
The lectures and the resources engaged students in discussing the following topics:
- dealing with peer pressure and bullying
- exploring one’s own identity
- resilience to stressful home and school life,
- disparity between a teenager’s lived reality and the pressure to be perfect in social media
- symptoms of depression, dealing with psychic inertia
- an impact of regular physical activities on the quality of life
- other risks to mental health
