Vivekananda Centre for Youth Counselling : Concept

One of the most important components of the Special Youth Programmes under Swami Vivekananda's 150th birth anniversary celebrations is the setting up of 'Vivekananda Centres for Youth Counselling' in major cities in India. One more vital aspect of these Centres will be the addressing of the psychological needs of the youth-their hopes and aspirations, their anxieties and fears, their depressions and agonies. The latest thinking in this direction is the concept of 'mental health promotion' through pro-active rather than reactive approach, community based approach rather than one on one counselling to deal with negative emotions per se through psychiatric treatment. In this context, we may do well to quote the words of a leading psychiatrist delineating the new thinking in this area.

"There has been a paradigm shift in counseling practice in recent years. The new thinking, which is now widely accepted, is to move away from the morbidity, medical model towards a community based approach for promotion of mental health. This is a mass approach and not a room-based one-on-one approach. The aim is to prevent mental illness by promoting mental health with the ideal 'Prevention is better than cure.' This approach is proactive rather than reactive. The beneficiaries are all youths, not just those who are already disturbed. Psychiatrists, counselors and monks would reach out to schools, colleges and universities and conduct workshops and seminars which would spread awareness and build life skills. The term used today is 'Life Skills Education'. This includes self-awareness building, empathy, problem solving, decision making, interpersonal relationships etc. Besides the youth themselves, there will be sessions for teachers and guardians. We can reach a large number of people in this way within the allotted period of two years. Volume generation would be much higher than in the morbidity model."

Apart from this, our youth should be engaged in positive action, service-oriented and beneficial to society. The formation of such positive goal-oriented and value-based groups that may be called Vivekananda Service Corps in our educational institutions and youth movements would go a long way in not only countering the menace of negative thinking among the youth, but also create, what Swami Vivekananda called "a lever for the good of humanity". Senior teachers, monks, mature parents successful in various professions of their own, etc., may be mobilized to act as resource persons, besides trained psychologists, psycho-analysts, doctors, psychiatrists and professional counsellors. The time is now come to seriously attend to the psychological needs of the youth who are looking eagerly up the elders in society to give them the proper direction to help them actualize their aims and goals by manifesting their true potential.