Primary Prevention of Addictions Among Youth Via Addressing Mental Health Well Being

The project aims to establish a consortium of Eastern and Western European universities that will collaborate on the design, piloting, and evaluation of an innovative, culturally sensitive primary prevention intervention for youth.

The interventions will focus on preventing different forms of addiction, including substance use, gambling, and gaming, by strengthening mental health and well-being, emotional regulation, normative beliefs, coping strategies, and self-efficacy. The conceptual framework of the project draws on the Theory of Planned Behavior (Ajzen, 1991), International Standards of Prevention (UNODC, 2018), and contemporary research on stress and resilience (Bonanno, 2021).

By bringing together universities and research centers from multiple countries, the project will integrate interdisciplinary expertise from psychology, education, public mental health, and social sciences. This collaboration will enable cross-national comparisons of risk and protective factors, identification of shared and context-specific stressors, and the co-creation of prevention models that are informed by universal evidence (international standards of prevention) while remaining sensitive to local cultural and social contexts.

University students will be involved both as junior members of the research teams and as participants and primary beneficiaries of the interventions. This participatory approach is intended to ensure that the prevention strategies are relevant, accessible, and ethically grounded, while also fostering ownership and engagement among young people.

The project will result in a modular prevention framework that can be adapted across countries and different educational settings. Pilot implementations will be carried out in several participating countries, followed by a systematic assessment of feasibility and effectiveness.

Through sustained inter-university collaboration, the project will also contribute to capacity building, training of early-career researchers, and the development of a shared European knowledge base on youth primary prevention.