Educating to empower

We begin our day with a multidisciplinary team meeting to review aspects of the service's operation and the care programs we offer. These meetings allow us to coordinate with other professionals and contribute our professional perspective to the recovery process for the young people and adolescents we serve.

Our role is to help these young people with mental health conditions value their personal abilities, empower themselves, and develop resilience so they can cope with the challenges they face in their daily lives. We provide them with personalized support as they discover themselves and the activities and connections within their environment that bring them value and well-being. Along this path, we collaborate with other professionals who share this goal: teachers, social services, leisure resources, and so on, as well as with their families and immediate support network. For us, building strong relationships and close connections with each individual is paramount.

Each person needs different resources, so we assess each case and propose different interventions, which can be individual, group, or community-based . In individual sessions, which last 45 minutes, we delve into topics such as healthy habits, leisure time, routines, and finding appropriate community resources. Ultimately, the goal is for young people and adolescents to become the protagonists of their own change, making conscious decisions about their future, choosing options, and asking themselves questions to generate change.

In community-based care, there are no set hours; instead, we adapt to each person's needs throughout the day. This intervention is designed for young people who have difficulty attending the Child and Adolescent Mental Health Center (CSMIJ) due to the severity of their disorder. When proposing appropriate resources for each individual, intervening in their home and directly with their families allows social workers to access valuable information. This approach represents a paradigm shift in mental health care, truly placing the person at the center of our intervention within their natural environment. It's a space where they themselves grant us permission to enter, enabling us to identify situations that we wouldn't see in outpatient care. This relationship creates a very strong bond with them and their families.

The social education team manages and facilitates groups where young people can progress in their recovery process. We currently have 15 open groups, some focused on specific issues such as eating disorders, autism spectrum disorders, social phobia, and substance abuse, among others. Attending these groups helps them strengthen their social skills in a safe environment , an improvement they can recognize when a group ends.

All the interventions we carry out are recorded in the medical records of the young people, but we also find time to be able to evaluate as a team the strategies used and to coordinate the transfer of cases with other professionals, such as the psychiatry and psychology specialists.