Children's Mental Health Research Center

The first part is about cutting-edge research in developmental psychology, brain science, and psychiatry, and the next part is about the actual problems faced by children aged 0-18 and their families. In the middle, we also need to provide implementable psychological support solutions to schools and communities. It is neither an academic institution that writes papers behind closed doors, nor a commercial studio that only provides one-on-one consultations, nor is it a "place to treat mental illness" in everyone's stereotype.

Last week, I met a third-grade boy in the waiting area who was squatting in a corner with an Ultraman card in his hands. His mother was wiping tears beside him and said that the teacher had been complaining for more than half a year, saying that the child was distracted in class and liked to push his classmates. He had enrolled in concentration classes worth more than 30,000 yuan and had two tutors to no avail. Finally, he was referred by a community grid worker. Our evaluation team spent two weeks, combining the diagnostic framework of DSM-5, the localized child behavior scale, a week's classroom observation records provided by the class teacher, and three in-depth interviews with parents, and finally ruled out ADHD (Attention Deficit and Hyperactivity Disorder). To put it bluntly, he didn't make friends after transferring to another school last year. He didn't know how to initiate conversations, so he used pushing people and grabbing rubber to attract attention. Later, we provided communication guidance to parents and class teachers four times each to teach them how to guide their children to express their social needs correctly. During the follow-up visit last month, this little boy was already a sports committee member at work, and his voice was louder than anyone else when he was in charge of queues.

Oh, by the way, many people who come to our center for the first time will be frightened by the messy play therapy room on the first floor: the walls are covered with crooked graffiti by children, the little people in the sandbox are staggering, and there is a fist-sized hole in the fabric sofa - it was kicked by a 12-year-old boy with a conduct disorder, and we have not repaired it yet. Every time a new child asks about this hole, we always say, "This is the mark left by a previous child when he was angry. If you are unhappy, you can hit it and throw it. You don't have to hold back." This is also a rule we settled on after several internal quarrels: consultants from the cognitive behavioral school believe that priority should be given to guiding children to vent their emotions correctly and not condone destructive behavior. ； Colleagues with a psychoanalytic orientation insist that giving children a sense of security that "allows them to be angry" is more useful than any other rationale. In the end, we each took a step back and regarded the broken sofa as an "emotional exit marker". Instead, it became the children's favorite corner.

There is actually a lot of controversy over psychological intervention for children in the academic community right now, and there is no “standard answer” at all. Take the frustration education that everyone is concerned about, for example. Some researchers are particularly resistant to the "emotional intelligence training camps" and "hardship summer camps" on the market. They feel that deliberately creating frustrations for young children will destroy their sense of security, which is pseudoscience that goes against the laws of development. ； Some colleagues also feel that as long as the courses are designed based on a scientific framework, they are better than those Douyin pseudosciences that parents read about "beating children can cultivate resilience". Our current compromise plan is to conduct free live broadcasts of popular science for parents. Each time we present the views of different schools, and we do not even hide our internal differences. We tell everyone that "there is no best way, only the method that suits your child." We will never engage in any gimmick of "solving all emotional problems with one trick."

There is another piece of trivia that many people don’t know: nearly 40% of the visitors to our center are not considered to have “psychological problems” at all. There are top students who can't keep up with the rhythm and cry every day after entering junior high school. There are eldest children who always wet their pants deliberately to get attention after giving birth to their second child. There are also parents who are purely anxious and come to ask "should I enroll my three-year-old child in an emotional intelligence class?" Last year, we cooperated with the local education bureau and conducted a round of psychological training for head teachers in 20 primary schools, teaching them how to distinguish between "naughty children" and "emotional abnormalities". We wanted to intervene in advance, so as not to wait for problems to be solved until they can't be solved. A while ago, a teacher sent us a message, saying that she used our teaching methods and discovered that a little girl in the class who never spoke was afraid to speak because she was bullied at school. The intervention was timely and no major problems occurred. It is more satisfying than how many SCIs we have issued.

When I was getting off work the day before yesterday, I met the boy who had kicked the sofa to pieces for a follow-up visit. He brought us a handmade airplane he folded and said that he was now the mediator in the class, specializing in the conflicts between his classmates. “"I know how uncomfortable it is to have a tight chest when you're angry," he said. "I would tell them they can go run around the corridor twice without hitting anyone." ”You see, there is no lofty significance in our work. To put it bluntly, it is just to help little kids grow little armor that can catch their own emotions.