The importance of promoting adolescent mental health in schools.

Abstract

During adolescence, the summation of the "physiological" crisis to stressful or excessive demands from the environment can represent a source of significant discomfort and difficulties for the person. For mental health operators, and not only, it is always important to know how to distinguish, in the complexity that adolescence entails, the "typical" adolescence behaviours from risky behaviours or incipient signs of a mental disorder. Psychological distress can most frequently result when, together with difficulties in completing developmental tasks, individual vulnerabilities add up to inadequacy of an environmental system. To date, scientific evidence shows an earlier onset of many mental illnesses in the last decades. This explains the need and the usefulness of implementing interventions for promotion and prevention of mental health in this specific age group. The school, where teenagers spend most of their time, is the best place where provide information, skills and strategies to implement mental and physical well-being, resilience factors and identify fragilities. This article aims to make a survey of mental health promotion interventions carried out in schools nationally and internationally.