Mental health education content

The current mainstream mental health education content is essentially built around the four underlying dimensions of "self-awareness - emotional regulation - social adaptation - crisis intervention". There is no absolutely unified standardized template, and it will be dynamically adjusted according to the differences in teaching objects and scenarios. There are also obvious differences in the emphasis of different psychological schools on the content.

When I was a resident psychology teacher in a public middle school a few years ago, I had to prepare psychology classes for different grades at the beginning of the school year. The classes were also 45 minutes long, but the content of the first lesson for first-year junior high school students and the preparation class for senior high school students were vastly different. When I teach children in the first grade of junior high school, I will take them to play the "guess their emotions" game, hold up cards with drawings of frowning, curling lips, and stamping feet, and tell them, "It's not coquettish to cry when you fail in an exam, and it's not petty to be angry when a classmate takes away your stationery. These are normal emotions, and there is nothing to be ashamed of." By the way, I will also add some tips on how to assign duties with new roommates and how to apologize if there is a conflict. ； When I reach the senior class, I almost never say "don't be anxious". Instead, I will lead them to do a 5-minute landing exercise. If their minds go blank during the mock test, I will teach them to pinch their own erasers to feel the hardness and temperature of the erasers. This will bring their attention back to the present moment from "What should I do if I fail the exam?". I will also teach them how to deal with the "concern bombardment" that their parents constantly say about the college entrance examination at the dinner table.

Oh, by the way, they also teach middle school students, and psychology teachers from different schools choose completely different contents. Colleagues with a psychoanalytic orientation will prefer to take students to do the "Original Family Portrait" activity, asking everyone to draw the most profound scene of getting along with their parents, and then sort out how this relationship affects the current relationship with classmates and friends. She always said, "Only when you know where emotions come from, you know how to get along with them."” ； However, teachers from the cognitive behavioral school feel that this kind of content is too "virtual" and it is better to directly teach implementable tools, such as the emotional ABC theory. When encountering something unpleasant, break it down into "what happened, what I was thinking at the time, and what emotions I had." There is no need to dwell on past experiences. Adjusting current cognition first can relieve emotions. Our teaching research committee had argued about this before, but in the end we couldn’t decide who was right and who was wrong. Anyway, both contents had useful feedback from students.

Many people have misunderstandings about mental health education, thinking that the content is to "teach you how to be happy." I once met a girl who was a sophomore in high school. She ran to the consultation room and cried, saying that she had just taken a class on "How to Maintain a Positive Attitude" last week, but she still failed the monthly exam this time and was still sad for two days. Was she too useless and wasted the class? I handed her a tissue at that time and said that this is not how the class was meant to be used. Good mental health education will never ask you to "must be happy", but will teach you to "allow yourself to be unhappy": you can cry for half an hour when you are sad, and you don't have to insist on saying "I'm fine"” ； When you don’t want to socialize, you can just hide at home and watch TV shows. You don’t have to force yourself to be gregarious. ； Even if you can't feel motivated for more than two weeks, take the initiative to talk to a psychological teacher. This is not weakness, but responsibility for yourself.

In addition to schools, mental health education in the workplace is another approach. Last year, I shared an EAP for an Internet company. I had prepared a lot of content on emotional regulation. However, during the opening question-and-answer session, the first boy to raise his hand asked, "How to politely refuse a work message sent by your boss at 11 o'clock in the middle of the night?", followed by several questions related to workplace boundaries and how to deal with PUA in the workplace. I temporarily adjusted most of the content I prepared, and half talked about how to set boundaries between work and life, and the other half talked about how to prepare a psychological buffer if you are laid off. At the end, a little girl secretly pulled me and said that three people in their team had just been laid off last week. She had been suffering from insomnia for almost a week. After listening to this, she finally dared to sleep peacefully.

Of course, there is still a lot of controversy about the content boundaries of mental health education in the industry. For example, in the past two years, many schools have promoted psychological surveys and screened students for depression. One group of people believes that "early detection and early intervention can avoid many extreme incidents." However, the other group believes that many schools directly send lists of students with depression tendencies to parents and even inform class teachers after completing the assessment, which is not done well at all. Privacy protection, on the contrary, caused secondary harm to students - I met a boy who was diagnosed with depression before. He was only occasionally depressed, but the class teacher specially arranged a separate seat for him and told the whole class, "Please give him more space." In the end, the boy didn't even want to come to school. There is still no unified solution to this problem, and the ways in which different schools deal with it vary greatly.

After working in mental health-related work for almost 8 years, my biggest feeling is that there is no “must-learn mental health content list” at all. If you give psychological classes to left-behind children in remote areas, no matter how many principles of emotional management you teach, it will not be as useful as teaching them how to call their parents who are working outside and say "I miss you" openly. ； If you provide psychological counseling to the elderly who have lost their only child in the community, no matter how many theories of positive psychology you teach, it will not be as useful as sitting down with them for half an hour to look through old photos and chatting with them about their children's childhood. After all, the essence of mental health education has never been to teach everyone to be a "perfect person without negative emotions", but to teach everyone to be a "self that can accept all emotions".