Children's Mental Health Prevention and Treatment Center

The Children's Mental Health Prevention and Treatment Center is not an "exclusive hospital for troubled children" as popularly thought, but a public health service position for children and adolescents aged 0-18 years old, covering the entire process of psychological science popularization, risk screening, early intervention, clinical diagnosis and treatment, and rehabilitation follow-up. Our core job has never been to "treat diseases", but to nip psychological problems in the bud as much as possible and reduce the possibility of developing into mental illnesses.

Many people may be shocked when I say this. I have been working in this industry for almost 7 years. Last week, I was on duty at the front desk and answered 17 consultation calls all morning. The first sentence of 12 of them was "My child has been disobedient/not going to school/losing his temper recently. Is he suffering from depression?" ”Another three were referred by the school. The teacher said that the child had self-harm, and the parents thought it was "a child pretending to have a tantrum."

I came across the most typical example last month. My mother dragged third-grade Haohao in. She threw her schoolbag at the front desk and shouted, "Check us out quickly to see if he has ADHD. The teacher said he couldn't sit still for five minutes in class, and he got into fights with his classmates. When he got home, he slammed the door after saying a few words." As a result, we did a scale assessment, a sensory integration test, and chatted with Haohao alone for half an hour. What kind of ADHD is this child? His parents recently got divorced, and his father didn't come home for half a month. His mother cried at home every day.

When it comes to intervention plans, there are actually different voices in the industry: Psychoanalytically oriented counselors are used to digging into the root causes of family interactions first. In Haohao’s case, they would recommend family therapy first to smooth out the impact of parents’ conflicts on the child.； Consultants in the cognitive behavioral school prefer to give children and parents a set of practical methods, such as leaving 10 minutes of "emotional tree hole time" every day, so that children don't have to worry about saying everything they want to say. ； Consultants with a humanistic orientation even think that the first two are too hasty. They should first let the children play in the playroom for a week to relieve their emotions. Our center never forces visitors to choose which one. Instead, we first discuss their needs with parents and children. If we want to quickly relieve symptoms, we will provide cognitive behavioral programs. If we want to solve deep-seated problems, we will arrange family therapy. If children are resistant to communication, we will start with game-based interventions such as sand play and painting. The most suitable ones are the best.

Many people have a filter on our place. They think that as soon as they enter the door, they will see white coats, scales, and a cold consultation room. This is really not the case - if you come to our center now and see, the walls in the waiting area are all graffiti by children. There was a 12-year-old girl with depression last year. When I came here for the first time, the paintings were all about black and gray clouds and rainy figures. When I came here last week for a review, I asked us for markers. I added a bright yellow sun to the previous painting and said, "This is what I saw when I went hiking with my father last week." Our orange cat Nian Gao is paralyzed on the cat climbing frame in the corner. It was a gift from a child who visited us before. He said he was well and left the rice cake to the children here to talk to them.

We have repeatedly studied the data of the National Youth Mental Health Monitoring in 2023 internally. 14.8% of primary and secondary school students have varying degrees of depressive symptoms, but the actual medical treatment rate is less than 3%. When most children have emotional problems, the first feedback they get is not "What's wrong with you", but "Why are you so ignorant" and "Why do children have so many troubles?" There used to be a 5-year-old boy. When the parents brought him here, they said he couldn't speak. He went to the ear, nose and throat department for a check-up and found nothing wrong. Later we found out that the boy's parents were in the catering industry. The nanny we hired before thought the boy was noisy and always kept him alone in the storage room. After being locked up for half a year, the boy didn't dare to speak. We played sandbox games with him for three months. The first time he said "cat" was when his mother cried in the observation room and couldn't stand still.

There is also controversy in the industry. Some people say that the focus of children's mental health should be placed in schools. Each school should be equipped with full-time psychological teachers to provide early screening and early intervention. Others say that school psychological teachers have to deal with both administration and inspections, and cannot provide professional intervention at all. They still have to rely on professional medical institutions. We are now running in both directions. We send two consultants to three corresponding primary schools every week to teach children emotional classes and provide training for teachers. When we encounter at-risk children, we communicate with their parents first. If they are willing to come to the center, we will open a green channel. For those who are not willing to come, we will go to the school every week to intervene with the children. Anyway, we can do whatever is convenient for them, as long as we can help the children.

It’s three o’clock in the afternoon on Wednesday, and there are several children in the lower grades of primary school building Lego in the waiting area. Just now Haohao’s mother posted a message on Moments, saying that Haohao was a disciplined little model this week, and he even took the initiative to talk to her about school when he got home. In the consulting room opposite the glass, the little girl who painted the sun was telling the consultant about her new little rabbit. Nian Gao was lying at her feet and yawning.

In fact, there are no such thing as "problem children", it's just that they have a knot in their hearts that they can't untie themselves, and adults don't see it. Our place is to help them find the thread to untie the knot.