Deal with it!
Take a step! Have a say!
Authors: Alenka Ćović (Croatia) & Marina Nikolić (Serbia) & Gordana Kuzmanović (Bosnia and Herzegovina)
Label me
At the beginning of this task, we had to create a circle and everyone got a piece of paper sticked to their back. On each of them, there was one word like ‘ happiness, anxious, sad, gossiper, lazy etc’
A person having a sticker on their back could not see it, but people around them were supposed to behave properly to what was written, so if someone had a sticker with sadness all others were comforting that person.
Then, we had a short discussion about our feelings during this activity, most of the people were confused or just felt weird or strange, some of the participants were asking for a goal of this activity…
In our opinion, giving someone a label at the beginning or seeing that someone already has a label results in treating that person differently, but actually, people with mental disorders want to be treated the same way as ‘normal’ ones.
Authors: Justyna Szajda (Poland) & Petar Dobrodolac (Serbia)
5 Steps of recognition
This session we started as usual with short energiser in order to activate our brains for some more time today and be actively involved in next session. Even we are very often not aware of existance of mental dissorders which other people have, but also which we have, in this session we worked on recognition of symptoms of mental disorders. We worked in small groups and share the symptoms in general which we are recognizing in our environment. After that, we collected all the symptoms and write it on flipchart in order to present it to other groups.
Next part we worked with definitions of mental disorders and symptoms for each of them. We tried to connect symptoms with concrete mental disorders in order to make it more recognizable for us as a youthworkers and people who work with young people in their daily job. This part was very important for us personally but also professionaly because it gave us concrete guides how to recognize with which kind of mental disorder young people deal today and regarding on that how to deal with it.
In the last part of this session, we talked more about 5 main mental disorders with which young people are dealing nowadays and we discuss it more detailed. Those 5 are depression, anxiety, OCD, bipolar disorders and ADHD/ADD. After this, we did self assesment in order to realize and become aware of everything what we learnt today but also in order to check if for us everything is clear or there is any need to repeat anything from today activities in order to understand it better.
Movie evening
As we had a very long and very tiring day, in the evening we watched movie which is connected with the topic of this project. Movie which we watched was “Inside out” and you can find description of the movie here: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2096673/
Authors: Anastasios Stefanopoulos (Greece) & Karen Inomvan (Bulgaria)