Thriving Together
Thriving Together – Shine like a star!
Can you do that… and when are you doing it properly – ‘shining like a star’? This is a big ambition, and it was one of the points made by the speaker at the Thriving Together event. Christian Hjortkjær showed that today’s imperatives for children and young people are ubiquitous and require them to stand out, be unique, ambitious, aim for the stars, dream big and so on.
Approximately 100 students and staff had registered for the event 'Thriving Together - Shameful (un)well-being', at which the two speakers Christian Hjortkjær, PhD and teacher at Silkeborg Folk High School and Ditte Roth Hulgaard, Clinical Associate Professor, Psychiatry, each presented their perspective on the theme of the failure to thrive.
Presentations: Unattainable ideals and a skewed discourse
Christian Hjortkjær argued that the children and young people of today no longer have to abide by rules. Instead, they have to live up to ideals. The challenge with ideals, however, is that they are unbounded, hard to define and therefore also hard to achieve. This exhausts the young people and makes them anxious about losing control of what is most important in their lives.
For many young people, friends and belonging to a community are crucial in their lives. The generations of young people that populate universities today have often grown up with a childhood and adolescence focused on large communities. In such communities, we have to be open, tolerant and inclusive. The challenge with large communities, however, is that for many people they are not conducive to the openness and familiarity that are necessary for people to share the parts of their identities that do not live up to contemporary ideals. Therefore, efforts to maintain well-being should focus on how we safeguard small communities.
Ditte Roth Hulgaard argued that the discourse around children and young people's failure to thrive is characterised by an unhelpful conflation of mental distress and mental illness. The two are different phenomena that require different initiatives. Mental illness is treated in psychiatry, whereas efforts to combat mental distress include normalising an emotional life that has both ups and downs. In addition, we need to create spaces and frameworks in which unattainable ideals are dismantled and which make it possible to be young without having a diagnosis that explains why you are unable to live up to the ideals.
How should we proceed with this theme at SDU?
In the second part of the event, Rune Mastrup Lauridsen, senior consultant at the Faculty of Humanities, facilitated a process and dialogue that focused on how we can strengthen the environment and structure concerning the well-being efforts at SDU.
The main points from these discussions include:
- The involvement of the students is essential. They must be involved and included in the dialogue about well-being initiatives. We have to show the students that we care about them by engaging them.
- Well-being initiatives must be linked to SDU's management and SDU's Strategy so that they go hand in hand.
- We lack empirical data and knowledge about well-being
- All of SDU must be involved. Involving all faculties and campuses.
Would you like to know more?
Contact SDU Education at studentorg@sdu.dk if you have any questions about the event.
At https://mitsdu.dk/thriving-together (opens in a new window) you can read more about this or last year's event.