Panajiota Räsänen


General description

Panajiota Räsänen is Student Life's student well-being expert and project researcher at the University of Jyväskylä. Panajiota is an experienced psychologist (PsM, PhD candidate in Psychology) and specializes in brief psychological interventions based on the third wave of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (FACT; Focused Acceptance and Commitment Training/Therapy). 

Panajiota provides support and enhanced guidance counseling to degree students with a focus on psychosocial and academic well-being. She offers support for study and learning related problems such as motivation issues, procrastination, planning and time-management issues,  stress and study fatigue, anxiety, depression, concentration and attention problems, social and communication difficulties. 

Panajiota's work also includes developing, researching, evaluating and providing as a service technology-based solutions to promote students' learning ability, well-being and mental health. Since 2011, she has been developing and researching the Student Compass (OK in Finnish) and its various forms of support. OK is a web-based wellbeing and life skills program that is freely available to students as self-help, with the support of a wellbeing coach or an enhanced guidance counseling specialist. Panajiota trains and provides supervision to Master’s level psychology students who participate as wellbeing coaches in the Student Compass and provide individual and group counseling to other JYU students. She has researched especially the positive effects of OK on student well-being as well stress, depression, and anxiety, and effective ways to alleviate them. Currently, Panajiota is responsible for all Student Compass’ operations, overseeing and managing all aspects from day-to-day activities, resource management, coach training to research and development. 

In addition, Panajiota teaches courses in well-being and clinical psychology. She also partly coordinates Student Life's services for international students, trains university staff upon demand and works closely with other wellbeing partners. 

More information on Student Compass related research: https://ok.jyu.fi/en/landing


Active JYU affiliations


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Personal keywords

Student Life; student wellbeing expert; psychosocial wellbeing; Student Compass; Internet Interventions; Blended Internet Interventions; Digital Mental Health Interventions; Contextual Behavioral Science; Acceptance and Commitment Therapy; Focused ACT;


Publications and other outputs


Last updated on 2023-18-12 at 10:13