The Master's Thesis is dealing with the research of children's and adolescents' mental health protection in Slovenian primary schools. In the theoretical part the meaning of mental health is explained and the key concepts in this filed are presented. I am focused on the mental health in the period of childhood and adolescence. In order to fully understand the definition of mental health I use an Eco social systemic explanatory model and the concept of protective factors and risk factors. Mental health is placed into social context and the impact of the epidemics and restrictions on mental health is presented. Further on I focus on the role of primary school and those working there to protect children's and adolescents' mental health. The theoretical part is concluded by presenting various activities and strategies, methods and approaches to protect mental health in primary school. Additionally I present some national as well as international findings on the topics.
The empirical part deals with researching the understanding of mental health among primary school teachers and consultants in primary school and their views of the role that primary school has about mental health protection. Primary school is a universal institutional place where all children meet and primary school therefore has, when the mental health issues increase, a unique opportunity to play the protective role. The temporary ways of protecting mental health are presented as well as detected protective factors. I was researching the impact of the epidemics on the mental health of children and adolescents as well as the opportunities how to improve the protection of mental health. Qualitative research included four primary schools from central Slovenia. The model includes four primary school teachers and four school counsellors. For data collecting I used half-structured interview and then I processed the data by qualitative analysis. Deductive and inductive approach was used for coding. I also used the descriptive method. The results revealed that the teachers and the school counsellors focus on the Salutogenic model and consider school to be very important for children's and adolescent's mental health protection. Due to the epidemics, various changes were noticed therefore different strategies of protecting mental health were developed. Their work includes strategies, methods and approaches to protect mental health in school environment and they develop protective factors and prevent risk factors. Individually and on the school level they expose possibilities to improve the area of mental health protection; they present possible obstacles in implementation as well as possibilities of their excession. In my Master's Thesis I wanted to research the possibilities that schools have concerning the protection of children's and adolescents’ mental health.
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