Paco Reyes and Nicolás Ruiz signed an agreement on 21 April for the creation of this new chair, which is the first on this subject to be set up in Spain.
The Provincial Council of Jaén and the University of Jaén (UJA) promote the creation of the PromoBienestar University Chair, aimed at promoting the health and mental wellbeing of young people. The president of the Provincial Administration, Paco Reyes, has signed today an agreement with the rector of the UJA, Nicolás Ruiz, for the implementation of this chair that ‘is born from the joint commitment of these two entities to continue developing innovative strategies in the field of mental health and youth welfare as both entities are concerned and concerned about the youth of our province’, has remarked Reyes.
Specifically, this chair is aimed at ‘preventing the emotional problems of this group through actions that promote emotional strength in the face of adversity, as well as developing strategies to address suicidal behaviour and self-harm and end the stigmatisation of the difficulties of health and emotional well-being that young people may experience’, explained the president of the provincial administration, who recalled the importance of youth policies in the line of action of the Provincial Council as evidenced by the III Youth Plan, currently in force.
Through the signing of this agreement – a ceremony which was also attended by the Deputy for Equality and Youth, María Dolores Ruiz, and the Professor of Psychology at the UJA, Luis Joaquín García López – the provincial administration will provide 10,000 euros this year to promote this chair, which is the first of its kind to be created in Spain and which will pay special attention to the vulnerable young population and to the groups most likely to be at risk of developing emotional difficulties.
The PromoBienestar University Chair -whose information is already available on the website https://catedrapromobienestar.es/-se – will develop training activities both for young people and for staff working with young people, such as professionals in education, health and social services. In addition, dissemination and knowledge transfer actions will be carried out, through conferences and events, as well as initiatives to promote research, development and innovation, with the promotion of lines of research, protocols for early detection and intervention, or volunteering programmes or internships to highlight the promotion of health and emotional wellbeing of young people.
Both the President of the Provincial Council of Jaén and the Rector of the University of Jaén have highlighted the cooperation of these two entities in projects of interest and strategic for the province of Jaén, such as CETEDEX, a line of collaboration in which the creation of this new Chair is framed. With the PromoBienestar Chair ‘the University of Jaén positions itself at the forefront in the field of health prevention policies and the emotional wellbeing of people, mainly adolescents and young people’, emphasised the Rector of the UJA.
Through this chair, ‘we are opening up a new space for training, research, knowledge transfer and social innovation in an area which is absolutely fundamental and which, moreover, permeates almost everything, such as mental health’, said Ruiz. In this sense, Nicolás Ruiz emphasised the importance of this chair in contributing to improving the mental health of adolescents and young people as ‘these stages are particularly critical, given that according to the data available to us, almost 50% of mental problems appear before the age of 14’, he pointed out. ‘A society like ours has no future without emotionally healthy people and emotionally healthy adolescents and young people, so the importance of this chair is no less important,’ he remarked.
