Inside Out (Pogled u sebe) – CroMSIC Croatia

Name of the activity: Inside Out (Pogled u sebe)

Country/NMO: CroMSIC Croatia

Program: Mental Health

Contact information: contact [email protected] to get in touch with the Activity Coordinator

Type of the activity: Continuous Activity

Category: Education

Focus area: Mental Health promotion and Prevention, Mental Health advocacy and public awareness, Mental Health among Medical Students, Communities especially vulnerable to mental health, Children’s Mental Health

Sustainable Development Goals addressed: SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-Being), SDG 4 (Quality Education), SDG 16 (Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions)

General description:

Project “Inside out”, with its main goal of promoting mental health, consists of eight workshops held in high schools by our educated students. These workshops are all connected and a part of a greater picture. After our students finish their education, they become peer educators and are given a class – in the same class a pair of two educators holds a cycle of eight workshops. All of these workshops are being supervised by experts.

Problem statement:

The biggest problem in our society is stigma related to mental health topics. Second problem is inadequate organisation of professional institutions that offer help. Thirdly, suicide rate is rising in Croatia (566 people committed suicide in 2020). Through our evaluation forms we noticed that young people are struggling with mental health hygiene and they lack education in this field. These problems affect different parts of society, and that is why we methodologically divided our activities.

Target groups:

• General population
• Medical students
• Other Students
• Children
• Youth

Beneficiaries:

• General population
• Medical students
• Other Students
• Youth

Objectives:

Raised awareness and reduced stigma concerning mental health and mental health problems.

Empower young people to positively react to challenges set for them in life, and alleviate negative attitudes towards mental health problems in general population.

Expand the focus of the project with the aim of covering 5% of the entire University of Zagreb.

Achieve and increase cooperation with external associations and organisations for mental health support and maintain supervision under the guidance of field experts and provide financial support by applying to tenders.

Educate all of our target groups by organising a minimum of 4 educational workshops in the academic year.

Motivate peer-educators and measure motivation by filling out a motivation questionnaire once a year.

Indicators:

1. We will get more people in general, but in particulare students and pupils to talk about topics of Mental Health throughout our workshops.
2. We will measure the benefits of the workshops throughout the whole cycle of eight workshops and see how the workshops have benefited the pupils.
3. We will organise workshops for other students from other Faculties that haven’t been given a chance to go throught the workshops earlier.
4. We will grow a number of sponsors and donators by reaching out to potential partners.
5. We will collect the data of the number of students that we have reached through our workshops.
6. We will collect the data from said questionnaire and analise the results.

Methodology:

Our activity starts from the beginning of the year – 1/10/2022 – by promotion and texts on our social media. In that time, we are working hard “behind the scenes” to contact all the schools in Zagreb area and our partners, then we collect a number of interested schools and a number of students there – after that, we organise two days long education for new peer educators – this year with a record number of 220 educators, and it was held for two weekends in a row. After that, educators are given all the needed material and sent into the classrooms. First educations start from the week od 5/12/2022 and will end sometimes in May for all students. A leadership of a project consists of seven well motivated people, who have all been a part of CroMSIC or still are. We are given needed resources for our activities by our partners, who we want to thank for that. We have mental health experts to help us with any potential risk.

Plans for evaluation:

We are evaluating our activity on two fronts – firstly, doctors of medicine and psychologists are holding an Initial interview with all our potential peer educators to evaluate how they are feeling after they themselves have gone through a two day long education and they are looking for potential risks of why not to let a certain student enter a classroom. Secondly, we are evaluating the sole purpose of the project – students in classrooms are given a Self-awareness form at the beginning of the first and at the end of the last workshop – this data is collected and analysed and results are published to see how they have grown and how much they have learned and bettered their picture about themselves and their aspects of life – this is of great importance, and each workshop itself is evaluated by students themselves, so we can always improve, be better and adjust the workshops to them, because they are most important for us – the students, and their well-being.

External collaborations:

Yes, we are collaborating with: School of Medicine, University of Zagreb, with City of Zagreb, with Center for Youth Health Zagreb and with Health Center Zagreb West