Jan Opletal Award 2025 for Veronika Kamenská for initiative “Don’t Panic”
Student awards for young people who change their surroundings. These are the Jan Opletal Awards, presented by the Student Chamber of the Council of Higher Education Institutions. This year, one of the three categories was won by Brno University of Technology graduate Veronika Kamenská, the creator of the mobile app “Don’t Panic”. The app helps people with mental illness. Currently, Veronika Kamenská is a doctoral student at Masaryk University, which nominated her for the award.
Note: All links in this article are in Czech only.
At the Jan Opletal Awards ceremony on Tuesday, November 11, the name of Veronika Kamenská was announced during the presentation of the Under 30 Personalities category. She was welcomed on stage by the event’s host, Michael Rozsypal, who expressed great admiration for the app’s user statistics. “The Don’t Panic app has been downloaded by more than 850,000 users so far, and every day it is used by approximately 500 people with suicidal thoughts and more than 1,000 people suffering from anxiety,” he said, asking how much work was behind those numbers.
| The Jan Opletal Awards are named after a student of the Faculty of Medicine of Charles University who was fatally injured during an anti-Nazi demonstration in 1939. They are awarded to students and recent graduates of secondary schools and universities for their activities within their studies, student and civic engagement, volunteer work, and other public-benefit efforts. In addition to Veronika Kamenská, this year’s winners include Anna Julie Wittmannová from Gymnázium Olomouc – Hejčín in the Secondary Schools category, and Martin Pisarčik from the Czech University of Life Sciences in Prague in the Universities category. Congratulations to all the awardees! |
About two months later, the first prototype was released. The developers consulted it with people with mental illnesses, psychologists, psychiatrists, and psychotherapists, and after receiving their approval, they launched the Don’t Panic app. Its success was supported by recommendations from helplines and psychologists, as well as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, which put great pressure on people’s mental health and led to a surge in downloads.
The Don’t Panic app is a free tool. “It’s like a last-resort box you can download to your phone without the need for registration. The user finds a guide to the five most common types of mental illness. After selecting one of the categories, they find techniques, exercises, and contacts for professional help,” explained Veronika Kamenská. She added that it’s no longer just a mobile app—together with about 140 collaborators, mostly student volunteers from psychology, social work, and other helping professions, they have also developed a chat and email helpline as well as counseling and educational activities. “The main message of our work is that mental illness should not be a taboo and people should not be afraid to ask for help.”
Veronika Kamenská and the Don’t Panic app have already received numerous other awards in the past – the Werner von Siemens Award for overcoming obstacles in study, the UN Award in the Czech Republic for promoting sustainable development goals, the Ministry of Education Award for extraordinary student achievements, and the Gratias Tibi 2020 Award for civic engagement.
Congratulations to Veronika Kamenská, and best wishes for continued success in her socially beneficial activities!
Veronika Kamenská – Jan Opletal Awards (profile of the awardee)
Recording of the Jan Opletal Awards 2025 on Czech Television’s iVysílání
Source: vut.cz/en
| Responsible person | Ing. et Ing. arch. Jana Němcová |
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