Adolescence, Depression, and YOU

A national online program for supporting young people in difficult times

Ana-Maria Cononovici, 22.09.2020, 18:16

‘Life, imagination, imagination, time.
Orientation, responsibility for young people.’ This is the name of
the campaigns for sponsorship initiated by the YOU program. It
includes articles on the emotional health of young people, about
school, or self-confidence. ‘You Are a Voice’ is a platform that
tries to support young people 18 or younger. It tries to do that by
lifting their spirits, but also assuring them that they are part of a
community, which is more and more needed nowadays, when social
distancing has exacerbated the sense of isolation that young people
have always felt.

We were told about the project by
Florentina Balos, networking coordinator and initiator of the
project:

It is a project for young people in
Romania, dealing with adolescent depression, something that is not
talked about enough, but also about professional orientation. It
includes a call-center line that had not existed until now. It has
started working in September. We formed a great team of dedicated
people, psychologists who council young people, and who were joined
by entrepreneurs and artists who hold during this period workshops,
all online, for vocational orientation, or emotional management, time
management, because when you are in school, it helps to prioritize.

We asked our interlocutor what is the
greatest need that young people have, from the observations of the
call-center, and we found out that it is socialization, reason for
which more and more young people are open to communication, both by
phone and online.

We train alongside professionals.
We will have a plan that will be ready by November, when everything
will be running smoothly. Right now, when it comes to young people,
all our attention is focused on fighting depression. This
call-center, which has already offered counseling to around 1,200
young people who called the number or wrote on WhatsApp, contacted
them, and they told us what they were going through and the areas in
which they could use our help.

Beyond the fact that, once on the
page, we find that we can invest in the future, by donating 2 Euro to
the call-center, we find lots of personal stories, one more
interesting than the next. We can find out how we can change the
feeling that ‘a friend is better than you at what they do’, that
‘failure is the best thing that can happen to you’, being at the
basis of everything that you succeed in life at. All these life
stories are meant to increase self-confidence and the ability to
understand life, with everything it brings, good or not-so-good.

Florentina Balos invited us to visit
them online:

We have the website you.com.ro, or
the you.youth Facebook page. When young people access the Facebook
page or the website, they see directly a WhatsApp page, where they
can contact us, and have a hotline they can call easily. Right now
we don’t have a 24 hours a day schedule, but we hope to soon have
that. Right now our schedule is Monday to Friday, 10 AM to 6 PM, and
on Saturdays from 9:30 AM to 3 PM. We soon hope to go round the
clock.

Also here you can find information
about schools around the world, and how to select programs for
studying abroad or domestically, and about all that defines a
teenager. Florentina Balos encourages young people to open their
hearts and minds to this form of socialization, with the promise that
results will not be late in coming.