Promoting youth (16-24) well-being and preventing mental disease: exploring educational professionals’ role and practice to enhance their activism

Based on the assumption that mental health is fundamental in every man’s and woman’s life (WHO, 2001; UE, 2014), this project focuses on the exploration of educational professionals’ role and practice in order to promote youth (16-24) well-being in an Italian metropolitan area. The project will try to explore modalities/strategies that, either implicitly or informally, teachers and educators set up in their professional environments, in order to promote wellbeing and prevent mental illnesses in the youth. Our hypothesis is that expert educators and teachers have developed a tacit knowledge on recognizing and handling, through educational strategies, those young people that show some initial signs of mental uneasiness, such as social isolation, school drop-out, or aggressive behavior. Therefore, with a better awareness, they can actively act and prevent the growth of disease, either in school or wherever they work, with different levels of awareness, planning their actions as primary preventative interventions. Framed in a qualitative approach, the research follows a phenomenological-hermeneutical method and a case-study strategy. Three cases are selected, in order to involve educational professionals working in various services, located in different areas of a metropolitan city in Northern Italy. The project firstly foresees the involvement of participants in a semi-structured interview. Subsequently, basing on the analysis of interviews, participants will be involved in a meeting in order to share the emerging themes and to discuss about about good educational practices to promote youth well-being. Finally, a document will be written, containing ideas and reflections about the projecting and acting of good educational practices to promote well-being and prevent mental disease in youngsters. Suggestions will be offered about the analysis of interviews, trying to focus on the educational role and practices in order to promote youth well-being.