A trauma hege - a múlt tanulságai és megküzdési módok bemutatása

"<< Background >>One of the greatest challenges today is protecting the mental health of young people—especially due to their increasingly deteriorating mental state—along with broad societal sensitization, reducing stigma related to trauma, and promoting the development of long-term adaptive coping strategies. However, to achieve this, it is essential to timely identify and alleviate, or even prevent, difficulties arising in problem areas. By recognising and minimising identity-destroying elements early, we can effectively assist young individuals living with various psychological hurdles, facing societal-social barriers, and often being at a disadvantage due to cultural differences in their daily lives.At the same time it is important that professionals who assist the youth are professionally and methodologically prepared to address these issues, and that they support young people with appropriate knowledge, self-awareness, and problem-solving competencies that contribute to successfully overcoming obstacles. To this end, it is indispensable to expand and modernise our knowledge and build long-term partnerships with institutions experienced in providing mental support to young individuals.<< Objectives >>Our goal was to alongside recognizing trauma and the psychological barriers arising from it keep the topic in focus and building on each other's diverse experiences and expertise, present each other with innovative mental health and identity-strengthening teaching and learning methods, and opportunities linked to the scientific exploration of these complex phenomena, while highlighting the diverse and individual variations of coping mechanisms.The project brought two target groups into focus: colleagues working in helping professions living in partner countries, and youth starting at a disadvantage due to cultural characteristics, social or economic factors who carry or encounter traumatic experiences.By encouraging active participation, experiential learning, and community building the project implementation aimed to make future operations of participating organizations more efficient and to strengthen communities supporting mental health aspects of youth. Sharing of professional methodological knowledge, know-how transfer, dissemination, and community building among partner countries could lay foundations for larger broader international projects to be realized in the future.<< Implementation >>The project was implemented by three organizations with Hungary being the main applicant, represented by Három Királyfi és Három Királylány Foundation in a coordinating role. Partners included Ház a Holnapért Association in Romania and the Szekeres László Foundation in Serbia. Former supports disadvantaged children and child protection while the latter focuses on identity research among the Hungarian minority in Serbia. Each partnership delegated four members to the project, holding qualifications and experiential knowledge relevant to our topic, such as psychology, mental health, teaching, and supervision.The project duration was 15 months, from early October 2023 to late December 2024. The main foundation of the project consisted of 3x4-day professional meetings held in the three countries. It's important to emphasize that during the project, meetings were tailored considering the needs of the target groups, aiming for sustainable solutions.We first visited Serbia in November 2023, followed by Romania in April 2024. Our last in-person meeting was in Hungary in October 2024.During and after the program we conducted several dissemination events, effectively managing our sources.<< Results >>The project was implemented by three organizations from Hungary, Romania and Serbia. We visited all three countries, to get to know each other, and learned trauma processing methods.During the Serbian meeting, we learned about research in theory and practiced it. In Romania, we worked on developing a new research questionnaire. Before the Hungarian meeting, we distributed our questionnaire, and by the Budapest meeting, a specialist had evaluated it; we expected the partners with these results.Additionally, in Serbia, we got insight into issues faced by the Hungarian minority, such as migration, with fathers working abroad and mothers and children staying behind ""half-orphaned,"" needing to speak a second (Serbian) language almost at a native level to enter higher education, which is a significant disadvantage.In Romania, we worked on coping strategies with concrete examples, under professional guidance.In Budapest, we got familiar with the EQ and WoWW methods and developed the Connector! self-awareness card game.The results are available in the Methodological Handbook, readable in the languages of the participating countries and English, and accessible on the website."