Abstract
This evaluation study aimed to assess the effectiveness of the Primary Mental Health Programme in the field of adolescent mental health prevention. Another aim was to find out whether variables such as respondents' gender, age and experience of mental illness of the respondents can influence their attitudes towards mental health.
The research group consists of 1898 secondary school students (1655 respondents from the experimental group who participated in the programme and 243 from the control group who did not participate in the programme) aged 14-19 years. The research method is evaluation feedback questionnaires given to the respondents before and after the implementation of the programme. Changes in students' attitudes before and after the programme were measured in three dimensions - (1) Seeking professional help; (2) Principles of proper mental hygiene; (3) Destigmatization of people with mental illness. Students in the experimental group participated in a preventive programme in the form of a one-day, five-hour workshop conducted by two professionally trained lecturers from the non-profit organization Nevypusť duši, which has been implementing the primarily preventive Mental Health Science Programme in secondary schools throughout the Czech
Republic for many years.
The results of the evaluation show that the Mental Health Programme is effective and seems to be the most beneficial in the area of (1) Seeking professional help and (2) Principles of proper mental hygiene. It also confirms that respondents' gender, age and experience of mental illness influence their attitudes towards some areas of mental health