Uite rezumatul: Stress in young people is increasing at an alarming rate. All those in contact with teenagers have witnessed the increasing pressures placed on this age group, often without an increase in the support available to them. High and continuous stress is overwhelming for children and adolescents and it often have negative effects on their physical, emotional and mental health. According to World Health Organisation, 10-20% of children and adolescents experience a diagnosable mental illness world-wide. 50% of these mental illnesses begin by the age of 14 and 75% by mid 20s. At the European level, in the top 5 causes of illnesses among youth are depression and anxiety. In low and middle income countries suicide is the first cause for death among youngsters between 10-19 years old. In high-income countries, suicide is the second cause leading to death. Causes of this phenomenon are: fears and dilemmas coming up in their trek to adulthood, peer pressure, adults pressure, stress induced by the educational system, competitive society and the need to succeed pressure. Long term stress not attended turns into burnout which can manifest in a variety of signs and symptom such as poor energy, negative changes in behavior, acting irritable or moody, withdrawing from activities that used to give them pleasure, routinely expressing worries, complaining more than usual about school, crying, displaying surprising fearful reactions, clinging to a parent or teacher, sleeping too much or too little, or eating too much or too little, significantly avoiding parents, abandoning long-time friendships for a new set of peers or expressing excessive hostility toward family members. Burnout effects may lead to serious consequences: health problems, lack of motivation and involvement, school dropout, conflicts, juvenile crime. Youth stress and burnout are not enough taken seriously by youth themselves, by parents, educators or health professionals even if relief measures can bring important positive consequences on youth well being, school performances, relationships, family life, future. JOY is a project addressing youth aged 14-20, on one hand and youth educators, parents, teachers, health professionals, on the other hand. The aim of the project is to raise awareness on youth burnout danger among the target groups and stakeholders as highly important and stringent issue related to children mental health and to provide a widely usable training solutions and burnout prevention and coping skills through partner cooperation and exchange of expertise, methodologies and good practices in order to reduce the effects and consequences in EU. Project objectives are: • Raise awareness on burnout and equip over 10000 young people with active burnout preventing and coping skills by developing a training package, a workshop toolkit, a best practice collection and effective learning and career planning guidelines for better lifestyle management, healthier decisions, more rational perspectives on competitions, skills in identifying and pursuing personal mastery goals, learning abilities and time management, in 24 months. • Raise awareness among over 30000 youth workers, teachers, parents and provide them effective and attractive tools to prevent youngsters burnout during the 2 years of project. The initiative offers improved knowledge, skills and practices in youth burnout prevention and coping, a new and not enough approached topic widely affecting European youth, in a highly accessible and attractive manner using recognized and validated training methodology, burnout recovery best practice collection, therapeutic workshops and guidelines for developing their career and learning effectively. The project initiative will raise awareness on youth burnout on more than 12000 youth and 2000 adults concerned, it will provide 24 trained youth workers, 24 youth trained internationally, 100 young people trained locally (Romania, Estonia, Lithuania, France, Norway) in youth burnout prevention and coping skills. The resulting products offer the advantage of being innovative and sustainable as they are easily transferable to other optional schools and universities curricula, NGO training and activities all over Europe.
Societies became increasingly digitalized. We achieve this priority by creating an international network of highly specialized trainers on the youth burnout prevention topic since it's one of the most effective tool for exploiting the project results across Europe and beyond. The course has guidelines for online version accessible on the project website in our region and across Europe by allowing free access. Youtube channel, Instagram, Flickr, pintest, ClassMates, Facebook account, LinkedIn will be used for youth burnout prevention media awareness campaign. Each partner exploited their own resources effectively to disseminate project results at local and international level. This project gave the opportunity to create an interactive network of youth workers specialized in burnout prevention and coping which has valuable resource for other universities, schools and youth organizations who will need expertise on the topic.
The project gave a serious contribution in making young people well-balanced, healthy and responsible adults by focusing on a issue that is not so obvious for them, for families, for the educational systems, for the children social protection systems, for the mental health facilities. Raising awareness, providing information and training tools for preventing and dealing efficiently with youth burnout, the project helped youth, families and society in avoiding serious consequences, such as mental health problems, lack of motivation and involvement, school dropout, conflicts, juvenile crime and acquiring good and strong characters, positive behaviours, healthy relationships, inclusive mentality, thus providing a reliable and sustainable society in the future.