Anna Partyka-Opiela: We need to fix our children's world quickly

The group of child and adolescent patients is special in medicine and especially in psychiatry. You participated in the creation of a report that outlines the needs and challenges of providing good treatment for these patients. What needs are outlined in this regard?

This is not a report about how bad things are, but about what legal solutions we should reach for to improve the situation. The most important areas are health care, education and education, and new technologies. The first thing that resounds in this report is cooperation. This is the key word in terms of actually improving the mental health of children and adolescents. A child functions in a specific environment, and therefore cooperation between the school, parents, as well as between health care in the broadest sense, is absolutely essential. Our legal demands focused towards issues such as coordinated care in a broad sense, also concerning cooperation between health care and the educational system. There is a need to increase the quality of services, including through regulation, for the professions of psychologist and psychotherapist, among others. Access to digital tools should be increased, and mental health should be introduced into the core curriculum. Our demands show that simply introducing a subject such as health education will be insufficient. The core curriculum must be broader and comprehensively cover this program. This entails money and increased investment in teacher education. However, schools are also, among other things, school hygienists. There has been a demand for how to use them to increase attention to the mental health of children and adolescents. Finally, we have the issue of improving the quality of psychological and pedagogical care at school. The last issue is new technologies. We won't get away from them, but there are demands such as banning the use of cell phones in schools or using EU regulations in the context of increasing safety in the area of cyberbullying.

These challenges are broad in scope. Do we have the time to implement these changes slowly, to spread the implementation of these demands over time?

We don't have time at all. We've already lost it, messed up our children's world, and now we have to fix it quickly. There is no time to spread this out over 10 years. This should be an absolute priority in Poland, including in the context of our presidency of the European Union.