Madrid, June 17, 2024.- The Minister of Youth and Childhood, Sira Rego, has advocated for addressing the structural causes affecting mental health in youth during her meeting today with representatives from the Youth Council of Spain (CJE) and OXFAM to thoroughly analyze their recent report on this matter in Spain.
Rego highlighted the importance of activating all public health mechanisms to tackle this issue, while also addressing key areas for youth such as “housing, employment, the eco-social crisis, or salary situation.” In this context, she expressed her support for expanding the potential beneficiaries of the Minimum Vital Income (IMV) to individuals between 18 and 30 years old.
“One of the measures we are going to promote from the Ministry of Youth and Childhood is the possibility that the Minimum Vital Income be extended to young people between 18 and 30 years old,” she assured, a demographic currently either excluded from or facing additional difficulties in accessing these aids. The minister considered it “a mechanism that can operate positively” and that can “help mitigate the most structural part.”
“The socio-economic issue and, therefore, the issue of class is crucial for mental health in youth,” remarked the minister, emphasizing that youth “is not a uniform social segment but is profoundly intersected by a class issue: the postal code ends up being decisive for mental health.”
The minister appreciated the work done by CJE and OXFAM and pointed out the importance of not focusing the mental health problem exclusively on the “medication of precariousness”: “We must also resolve the structural, socio-economic issue.”
Automatically translated with OpenAI from Spanish