Building Resilience in Youth

Purpose

The purpose of this report is to identify strategies on how to build resilience within youth and explain the role of the PERMA + health framework plays in building resilience to improve health status of the teenagers all across Australia. Also, this report aims to analyse and critique information in relation to mental health and to develop an action strategy to build resilience.

Background

What is resilience? Why is it important that teenagers have resilience? Resilience has been most frequently defined as positive adaptation despite adversity. Resilience is the ability to cope with the changes and challenges in life and how to strengthen and overcome your problems in life and helps with mental health and wellbeing. It is important for teenagers to promote their own resilience because they are highly known who are prone to mental issues so it’s important for them to know resilience and how they can build their resilience for them to know how to overcome their problems in life. Because many teenagers nowadays are getting through depressions and they think that there is no way to overcome their problems so they think of a way that they can just forget all of their problems, that’s why the percent of suicidal issues are increasing and mostly of them are teenagers. The health status of Australia’s teenagers is burdened by mental health problems such as suicide, depression and anxiety.

Health Model

PERMA + is the use of PERMA, positive emotion, engagement, relationship, meaning, accomplishment plus optimism, sleep, physical activity and nutrition. PERMA helps people think positive and to be happy. PERMA helps youth to build resilience by being motivated and setting goals in life. PERMA helps teenagers to overcome and to learn how to face their problems in life and how they remain to be positive and to control their thoughts, by communicating with others and by focusing on what they want and love to do, by knowing what’s their purpose in life. The plus in PERMA stands for physical activities, nutrition and sleep it helps us to achieve PERMA. The health status is assessed by considering measures related to the incidence or prevalence of health conditions, and measures related to human functioning, wellbeing and mortality rates and life expectancy (AIHW, 2018). The determinants of health domain is measured by considering health behaviours, and personal biomedical, environmental and socioeconomic factors.

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How Perma Can Be Used To Build Resilience and How its Affects the Teenagers Health

Literature Review

Australia’s health 2018: is a report of Australia’s health 2018. This report contains some of the key findings and concepts of the Australians health. By improving our health behaviours can help us to be more healthy and to live longer. Health behaviours are crucial, but they are not the only factors that influences our health we also have social factors and government polices, and the access to health services that help us to improve our health behaviours.

The health status of Australian youth over the past years changed into a positive and negative ways. The young people in Australia experience the impact’s of the negative burdens into incoming with adulthood. The top three personal concerns are coping with stress (43%), school or study problems (34%), and mental health (31%). As can be seen in australia’s health 2016 many teenagers behavioural risk factors that can affect current and future health and wellbeing of the youth. Giving attention in health concerns can improve the immediate quality of the life of the young people. According to the young minds matter survey, in 2013-2014 (Lawrence et al. 2015: 14% (245,000) young people aged 12-17 has a mental health disorder, some mental health disorder that they have are anxiety, which is (7.0%), followed by attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at (6.3%) and lastly the depressive disorder (5.0%).

Mental health is such as important issue across all age groups and experiences of mental illness can have profound impacts on the wellbeing of young people. Having a good mental health, or being mentally healthy, is more than just the absence of illness, rather it’s a state of overall wellbeing.

Loneliness and social isolation is the one of the main causes of reduced wellbeing and mental illness in youth. Teenagers naturally encounter different problems and challenges in life on the road to adulthood. One of the reason why teenagers spend more time on their electronic devices and social media is because of loneliness and isolation. Experts are raising serious concerns about the impact this is having on their social skills and mental health. A new study from Australia longitudinal study into Australian children found children aged between 10 and 11 spend 3.5 hours alone on weekdays and 4.5 hours alone on the weekends, but by the age of 14-15 they’re spending just under 5 hours alone every day during the week, and over 6 hours each day on the weekends. Teenagers spending their time in their rooms on their devices, playing games, using social media etc, and is isolating them from their family and friends. Using mobile phones and other electronic device and looking at screens for hours a day can have some serious health and mental health consequences. The psychological effects mainly result from the social isolation, exposure to harmful material, and internet addiction. The research team found that of the more than 2500 students without ADHD symptoms at baseline at the start of the study, nearly 81% reported high-frequency use of digital media after 24 months, and 5.9% of these teenagers experienced self-reported ADHD symptoms during the study period. The most common high frequency digital media use reported in the study was checking social media sites with (54.1%) of teenagers reporting this as a high- frequency activity.

As we all know we teenagers have their own different problems and challenges that we encounter each day, and one of them is stress, different kinds of stress can be school problems, family problems, relationship problems etc. As a teenager I have my own problems in life whether it’s a school problem or a family / relationship problem. Being a teenager it’s hard to easily understand how we can managed our stress and deal with problems in life, and this leads to mental health issues which affects us. That also leads to mental illness, like anxiety that cause of stress. Being stress can also lead to loneliness, when I was in my 13-14 years when I’m stressed and depressed I feel that no one care about me, and no one understands me and I think that using my mobile phones will help me to forget my problems even though we all know that it’s not right to use mobile phones to forget problems we need to face it and think of what we should do to and we need to learn to managed our own problems in life. When I learned about how should I managed my problems, I started seeking some help with my family and friends whenever I have problems in life. Also having a problem is just a challenged in every individuals for us to grow and learn.

The 40 developmental assets framework was created by search institute consisting of preventative measures, positive experience, and qualities that young people need to grow up healthy, caring and responsible. These assets are protective factors that have been consistently shown, by research, to buffer youth from risk.
The result of my developmental assets shows that Empowerment is the most vulnerable assets that I have and it includes, community values youth, youth as resources, service to others, and safety. This assets are about serving and helping the community and being a responsible individual as a youth. The individual assets that present big barriers to my own health is the ‘Youth Programs’ that spends time in outdoor activities like playing sports and doing some exercising. This can affect my health because as a person it is important to have a physical activities and to exercise to improve our health and reduce the risk of developing several disease, regular activity can improve our quality of life. It is important for us to know what are barriers vulnerabilities to our health for us to be aware of what we need to improve and to know what things do we need to do to improve our health.

The result of my developmental assets shows that Empowerment is the most vulnerable assets that I have and it includes, community values youth, youth as resources, service to others, and safety. The barriers for my most vulnerable assets are having lack of socializing in the people in the community, and by joining activities to help the community. Also by knowing what role should you do for others and how we give importance to other people.

Knowing your meaning and purpose in life and knowing the importance of living a life with happiness and fulfillment helps us to motivate ourselves to know what’s our role in life. Meaning is knowing your meaning in your life, meaning gives people a purpose on their life. This would help me with my most vulnerable assets by knowing and doing those things that I don’t do a lot and spend time to the things that can help the community. This would try me to explore new things in life and to socialize more with other people and the people in our community. Things to do daily/weekly to improve my vulnerable assets, know your purpose in life, contribute and help community organizations, serve and volunteer to help the community, socialize with the people in the community. Martin Seligman defines the meaningful life as knowing what your highest strengths are and “using your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are.” He comments that authentic happiness is meant “as a preface to the meaningful life and that while it is possible take drugs to generate the effects of positive emotion and pleasure through pharmacology, it is not possible to synthesize the positive effects of being in the flow or of experiencing meaning.”

Recommendations

• Specific – I will reduce the amount of time that I spent on my electronic devices. To be able to do this effectively I will set my plans in a day and do productive work, and if I will use my phone in a day I will set a timer for 2 hours in each day to use my phone. This would help me to do more things rather than just browsing on my social medias.
• Measurable – I am able to set timers for my phone and each apps that I use to track my progress in my screen time on my phone.
• Achievable – To make this goal effective and achievable I will know my limitations and motivate myself to be more productive to do my work.
• Relevant – The relevance of my goal is to be able to manage my time and set goals and by prioritizing my goals to achieve it, and knowing my limitations to use mobile phones, it would help me to be able to know my meaning in life and use my time wisely.
• Time- framed – I believe that my action strategy will help me to become a better person and will show my improvements that would motivate me to follow every day. My time limits will help me to know what I will priority on that day and to achieve my goals and implement more meaning to my life.

Conclsion

Therefore, the purpose of this report is to identify and analyse on how to build resilience to youth and how the role of PERMA + framework in building resilience to improve youth’s health status. In this report PERMA + was discussed PERMA + helps people especially the youth’s, it also explained the health status and the health determinants and how screen time affects the mental health of the teenagers.

References

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