Counselling in China: Past, Present and Future

Bien que le counseling et la psychothérapie soient pratiqués en Chine depuis bientôt deux décades, la psychologie du counseling n'a pas émergé comme profession ou discipline. Dans cet article, les auteurs utilisent la méthode SWOT pour analyser le développement de la psychologie du counseling en Chine. Les forces, les faiblesses, les opportunités et les menaces quant au développement d'une psychologie du counseling sont circonscrites ainsi que les directions futures. Although counseling and psychotherapy have been practiced in China for almost two decades, counseling psychology has not emerged as a profession or discipline. In this article, the authors used the SWOT method to analyse the development of counseling psychology in China. Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats were traced, and future directions for the development of counseling psychology in China were considered.

Journal of Counseling & …, 2010

Boasting a booming economy and having showcased itself to the world as the host of the 2008 Olympic Games, China is poised to become one of the most powerful nations in the world. Signs of economic progress abound in the massive urban centers. As part of this rapid economic and social change, the Chinese people are experiencing significant multiple stressors. At the World Mental Health Day held in Beijing on October 2, 2006, Zhou Dongfeng, president of the Chinese Society of Psychiatry, revealed that at least 100 million of China's 1.3 billion people have various mental disorders, such as schizophrenia, bipolar depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and social phobias. According to one report, mental illness accounts for 20% of the total patients in hospitals, making it the most widespread disease in China (Fei, 2006). Although the worldwide average rate for suicide is 14 per 10,000, the suicide rate in China is approximately 20 to 30 per 10,000. In urban areas, where the signs of economic progress are most obvious, suicide is often committed by jumping from high-rise buildings or into rivers, whereas in rural areas, suicide is often committed by ingesting pesticides or other poisons. According to gender, the suicide rate is higher among Chinese women than among Chinese men. Suicide is the leading cause of death for Chinese individuals between the ages of 15 and 34 (Ji, Kleinman, & Becker, 2001; Liu, 2003). Xinhua news agency reported that approximately 10% of 340 million youth under the age of 17 experience mental and/or behavioral problems such as anxiety, depression, alcoholism, and criminal activity (Radio Free Asia, 2004). During Chinese Vice Health Minister Zhu Qingsheng's address at the 13th World Mental Health Day, he expressed concern that the "problems with mental health have threatened the development of China's human resources" (Radio Free Asia, 2004, para. 2). In addition to these mental illness concerns, there are many other reasons for the Chinese to seek psychological help; among the most common are mental distress, school-related problems, finan

This article provides a historical overview of the development of Western psychotherapy in China based on existing scholarship and my own ethnography. I describe a meandering trajectory embedded in the shifting political, social, and economic circumstances: the tentative beginning in the Republican period, the transmutation and destruction in the Maoist period, the relatively slow recovery and progress in the earlier reform period, and the eruption of the psycho-boom in the new millennium. Emphasis is placed on the reform period that began in the late 1970s, but by incorporating the previous periods I intend to show that the long-term process is highly relevant to the current psycho-boom. I further reveal that the development of psychotherapy in China has involved a dual processboth the building of this new profession and the infiltration of related ideas into the broader society-and that this duality is particularly evident in the recent psycho-boom. Finally, I discuss the implications of the new Mental Health Law and the preliminary signs that psychotherapy as a profession is taking root in urban China.

The breathless pace of market reform in China has brought about profound ruptures in socioeconomic structures and increased mental distress in the population. In this context, more middle-class urbanites are turning to nascent psychological counseling to grapple with their problems. This article examines how Chinese psychotherapists attempt to ''culture'' or indigenize (bentuhua) three imported psychotherapy models in order to fit their clients' expectations, desires, and sensibilities: the Satir family therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and sandplay therapy. It addresses three interrelated questions: What is the role of culture in adopting, translating, and recasting psychotherapy in contemporary China? How is cultural difference understood and mobilized by therapists in the therapeutic encounter? What kind of distinct therapeutic relationship is emerging in postsocialist China? Data presented here are drawn from my semistructured interviews and extensive participant observation at various counseling offices and psychotherapy workshops in the city of Kunming. My ethnographic account suggests that it is through constant dialog, translation, and re-articulation between multiple regimes of knowledge, cultural values, and social practices that a new form of talk therapy with ''Chinese characteristics'' is emerging. Finally, I reflect upon what this dialogic process of transformation means for psychotherapy as a form of globally circulating knowledge/practice.

PubMed, 1994

Since the end of the cultural revolution (1966-78), China has opened itself to Western influence and ideas, including those of Western psychotherapy theory and practice. The faster pace of life under the new market economies has been associated with increased psychological problems and a greater need for psychotherapy. Psychotherapy integration, which fits well both with basic Chinese beliefs and the collectivist orientation, is likely to continue to grow in influence and importance in China. Remaining obstacles to the development of psychotherapy in China include lack of psychotherapy skills within the medical profession, lack of potential profit from doing psychotherapy, stigma attached to mental problems by the masses, and failure to define basic requirements for psychotherapy training and practice.

Open Journal of Psychiatry, 2012

The purpose of this study is to reach a better understanding of how minor psychological problems (MPP) are perceived in China by well-educated Chinese. An exploratory qualitative design is used. The results are based on interviews with professionals and students practicing Chinese medicine (TCM) and lay people from three urban sites. Minor psychological problems have traditionally not been labelled as disorders or illnesses but challenges in daily living or as "heart problems" and seemed to have less serious consequences than we are accustomed to think from a modern western outlook. "Problems of life" rather than sickness was the category that best summarized perceptions of such problems among the Chinese. It points to a salutogenetic perspective reflecting perception of mental health and MPP as processes of adaption and interpretation of meaning rather than medical conditions or sickness. Due to the influence from the West these problems are, however, more often comprehended as a health problems or even sickness, and not solely natural problems of life.

Mental Health in China and the Chinese Diaspora: Historical and Cultural Perspectives, 2021

This chapter examines the notion of therapy and its growing significance in the social, political, and affective life in China during the last four decades. Specifically, it explores the ways in which the languages, ideas, and practices of psychology have been applied to various domains for different purposes and imperatives including addressing the current mental health epidemic. This therapeutic ethos acts as both a mode of thinking and imagination. Since therapy suggests an illness or disease and it encompasses a dual process that both diagnoses (identifies an issue) and prescribes (offers solutions), this understanding can thus be easily appended to governance, problematizing (pathologizing, thus individualizing) social issues, and then proposing solutions. This mode of therapeutic governing involves a unique mode of psychologization in China, in which psychological expertise can be dispensed by non-experts with real consequences. It centers on the management of subjectivity. This mode of therapeutic governing accesses people's subjectivity through "care" and "permissive empathy" that renews the government's role as the "guardian of the people". This chapter contends that the ways this therapeutic ethos involved in Chinese society manifest the implicit complicity among therapy, the state, and market.

Applied Psychology-an International Review-psychologie Appliquee-revue Internationale, 2007

Cet article décrit la psychologie du counseling comme discipline émergente à Hong Kong. L’analyse SWOT a été utilisée pour examiner les forces et les faiblesses internes, les opportunités et les menaces externes de cette profession. A partir de cette matrice, des questions stratégiques relatives à l’accroissement et au développement de la psychologie du counseling sont identifiées et discutées. Une vision de la psychologie du counseling à Hong Kong dans la prochaine décade est présentée.This article describes the emerging counseling psychology discipline in Hong Kong. A SWOT analysis was used to examine internal strengths, internal weaknesses, external opportunities, and external threats confronting the counseling psychology profession. Through this process a number of strategic issues central to the growth and development of counseling psychology are identified and discussed. A vision of the counseling psychology discipline in Hong Kong for the next decade is presented.