Mental health and emotional balance are rights of children and adolescents and essential conditions for their harmonious development

Bucharest, October 10, 2024. UNICEF marks World Mental Health Day on Thursday by stressing the need to invest in mental health promotion, prevention measures and tackling the complex problems children face today. Making children's right to mental health a reality requires communication, action and interventions in families, schools and communities, but also digital literacy to identify and tackle online misinformation.

The prevalence of mental disorders among adolescents in Romania is 11.2 percent[1].  Furthermore, 32 percent of 15-year-old girls in Romania felt lonely most of the time or always in the past year, which was significantly higher than for 15- year old boys which was at 21 percent[2].

Among the most frequently diagnosed mental disorders are conduct disorder (24.19%), attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (22.65%), anxiety disorders (19.23%), autism spectrum disorders (14.47%), depressive episode (9.14%), attachment disorders (4.3%), school phobia (3.10%) and eating disorders (2.88%)[3]. Furthermore, approximately 22,000 children and adolescents are living with a diagnosis of mental illness. These are worrying numbers that require urgent action.

Together with its partners, UNICEF in Romania is implementing the 24-month initiative, "Romania for every child. Emotional Balance", developing a functional intervention model for mental health and psycho-social support. Together with the Romanian Government, UNICEF launched a public awareness campaign on the importance of children’s and adolescents' mental health and family communication for emotional balance.

"To create positive impacts for children’s and adolescents’ mental health, communities must provide [GA6] multisectoral interventions that support families to establish safe home environments. We also need to change the mental health discourse to reduce stigmatization by developing safe and accessible resources for adolescents, parents and professionals," said Gabrielle Akimova, UNICEF Acting Representative in Romania.

Together with the Romanian Angel Appeal Foundation, UNICEF conducted research on digital resources on mental health and psychosocial support which underscored the limited availability of such resources. Adolescents in the study said they could not envision life without the internet but admitted that they needed digital literacy to assess critically information to identify misinformation. They also said that parents need to increase their awareness of mental health issues.

The report recommends the development of digital resources in Romanian that are coherent, comprehensive and tailored to adolescents, taking into account aspects such as children’s specific age, school and home environments, or physiological changes.

UNICEF with its partners developed a guide for all those involved in the education of adolescents, but particularly for teachers and school counselors. The guide provides a collection of non-formal activities on adolescent mental health, covering topics such as managing stress, building resilience, improving social relationships and promoting self-awareness.

[1]Global Burden of Disease Study, 2019

[2]Cosma, A., Abdrakhmanova, S., Taut, D., Schrijvers, K., Catunda, C., & Schnohr, C. (2021). A focus on adolescent mental health and wellbeing in Europe, central Asia and Canada. Health Behaviour in School-aged Children international report from the, 2022.

[3]National  Strategy on Mental Health of Children and Adolescents in Romania 2016-2020