School Children Mental Health Europe

Project: Research

Project participants

  • Sant Joan de Déu Research Foundation
  • Yeniden Health and Education Society

Description

Children's health determines largely the health of the future population. Mental health in children has been proven to predict social exclusion; in addition most of the children suffering from some external disorders are suffering from anxiety or depressive disorders as well. This project aims to build up a set of indicators across eight different member states in their own language in order to be able to collect and monitor children's mental health and its major risk factors in an efficient and low cost way in each country. Indicators based on measurements of child's health are important for identifying progress, problems and priorities, changes over time and newly emergent issues. Among child measures, mental health measures have been obviously under developed. In one of the rare attempts to set up child health indicators for Europe, suicidal attempts have been proposed as a unique indicator to monitor child mental health. Indeed, this will be useful to monitor adolescents' and preadolescents' mental health, but it will not monitor younger children's mental health at all. This project aims to fill the gap and develop and experiment a set of mental health child indicators that could be used to monitor child's mental health across time and places all over EU. This has to be done in the context of a community co-funding set-up in order to support the diverse member states and candidates to participate in a project whose aims are to underline the feasibility of measuring child's mental health and the necessity to do it in a comparable manner across member states and over time, in order to be able to monitor it and therefore to fully benefit from evidence-based preventive measures dedicated to the European child population.
AcronymSCMHE
StatusFinished
Period27.11.0729.04.15

Research outputs