– Eight hundred thousand school children need professional access to psychiatric and psychological care. This is the population of the second city in Poland – Krakow. This scale of needs is huge – emphasized Zuzanna Lewandowska, president of the TVN Foundation.
The TVN Foundation was the hostess of two events at the Impact'25 conference: a discussion panel about the mental health of children and youth in the digital era, as well as talks with Max Brzezicki, a Polish scientist who wants to create a diagnostic program of mental illness.
“We live in very difficult times”
The president of the TVN Foundation pointed out that “Fortunately, today there is a lot of talk about the need to deal with the subject of mental health of children and youth.” As she explained, it is important that also at such conferences as Impact'25, by definition on a business subject, the topic of mental health appears.
– I am deeply convinced that the topic of mental health has become such a strategic topic, because we are talking about the fact that we want to build a strong Polish society. We live in very difficult times, demographically, geopolitically. So there is a lot of burden on us. And now we must develop in these realities young people who are already struggling with an additional series of problems arising from the civilization changes in which we are. This is an extremely important topic – Lewandowska pointed out.
As she added, “Everyone must find their DNA in this huge ocean of needs.” Therefore, as the TVN24 Foundation has informed, it has a purpose to “lead to the fact that we will finance about 350,000 therapeutic sessions per year” by 2027. – This is the brick that we want to add as a foundation – Lewandowska said.
“Two weeks later we returned to the starting point”
She also reminded that the TVN Foundation has been looking after children and youth for 24 years. – But we are also a bit of such builders. We renovate and build hospitals. We have recently opened the Center for Psychiatry and Oncology at the Children's Health Center – she reminded.
– a huge, state -of -the -art hospital for six thousand square meters, 30. A building at the Children's Health Center, 30 hospital beds, three reference levels. And what happened? And two weeks later the children lay in the hospital corridors, because there were no places. This is a modern hospital built on the basis of the criteria that the experts designated. We built this hospital, spent PLN 35 million on it. And two weeks later we really returned to the starting point. It only shows how huge the scale of needs is – she explained.
She added that in this situation the TVN Foundation donated money to double the number of beds. – But it only shows how much a scale of needs we are dealing – she emphasized.
She noted that this place “is the most modern institution of this type in Europe”. – One of the reasons why it is so, which is perverse is not only that this building is stately, but also that he is in the Children's Health Center – she added, emphasizing that “for decades psychiatric hospitals were built somewhere below the city, somewhere in the forest.” “It is also symptomatic, as we treated this problem at all,” she said.
“This is an open topic”
Lewandowska also emphasized the problem, related to the need to make a decision on who she will rest on responsibility for regulating the issue of young people to digital devices.
– This is an open topic. (…) I see that there is no such certainty all the time, whose side should be on, what else a decision regarding what to do with this clearly known problem of the negative impact of smartphones on the mental state of children and youth – summed up the president of the TVN Foundation.