Op-Ed Contributors

Psychologist ministers to students

By Ku Ma (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-04-22 07:46

Editor's note: Suicide is the No.1 killer of Chinese University Students, and their psychological problems are rising.

At Peking University, Xu Kaiwen, PhD, is the supervisor of the university's Counseling and Psychotherapy Center and helps students for free. Off campus, he is a psychiatrist at different hospitals and psychological centers that may charge 500 to 1,000 yuan ($73 to $146) per one-hour treatment.

Xu is one of the only 33 psychological trauma therapist in China and he is concerned about the psychological crisis that is besetting many of China's universities.

Sitting in his small clinic on campus, Xu said new measures are needed to prevent high-risk students from committing suicide.

Suicide is reportedly the Number 1 killer of Chinese university students. On April 5, a junior at the University of Science and Technology in Beijing jumped to her death out of a dormitory window, a week after a student at Nanjing Forest University hanged herself.

Even after the Peking University psychotherapy clinic was set up in 2005, at least one or two students a year ended their lives, Xu said.

"It's a great pity that none of those students turned to us before they died," he said. Part of the problem is that the small staff at the clinic has to serve a top university with more than 30,000 students.

"We have to admit there is still something lacking in our efforts to find students with the most serious mental problems," Xu said

In the past five years, Xu and his five colleagues have counseled some 10,000 students. Each student at the university has access to one hour of counseling for six times a semester. The psychologists counsel 12 students a day.

When a new semester begins, freshmen are required to fill out a psychological questionnaire which includes such questions as: "Do you feel depressed?" "Have you ever wanted to commit suicide?"

Xu's team will then evaluate the questionnaires and ask the students with psychological troubles to come to the clinic.

In the surveys, Xu finds that the number of graduate students who have mental problems is on the rise. Academic pressures and gloomy job expectations constitute great challenges to students' mental health, he said.

A Higher Education publication survey of 28 universities showed that 59 percent of students polled had communication problems; 26.1 percent suffered from depression; 22.5 percent suffered anxiety, and 20.7 percent had low self-esteem. According to the survey, 57.4 percent of the interviewees said they felt pressured because of job expectations, while 53.4 percent considered their academic load a heavy burden.

A survey conducted by the Social Survey Institute of China indicates that 26.5 percent of college students polled have thought of suicide.

According to Xu, the cause of the majority of the 80 suicide attempts he has intervened in was an unhappy family situation. These include an early divorce by parents, being raised by someone other than parents, and domestic abuse or violence.

Neither poverty, job disappointments or failed love affairs lead to student suicides, he said.

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