From June 20 to 22, the 13th National Conference on Psychological Health Education and Counseling for College Students was held at Jilin University.

More than 1,000 psychological health educators, including leaders of the Ministry of Education, leaders of the Education Department of Jilin Province, and more than 600 representatives of colleges and universities, psychology institutions, and psychological health institutions attended the conference.

Under the theme of “Psychological Health Education for College Students with Chinese Characteristics in the New Era”, 25 experts from home and abroad shared research results of psychological health education for college students and commended advanced collectives and individuals in national psychological health education between 2015-2018. The Psychological Health Education Center of Tianjin University received the “National Advanced Collective of Psychological Health Education for College Students” Award. This award is the highest honor in the field of psychological health education in colleges and is evaluated every 3 to 5 years. Professor Yang Li, Director of the Psychological Health Center, was also awarded the “Outstanding Worker in Psychological Health Education for College Students”.

For a long time, with the strong support and promotion of school leaders including the leadership of TJU Office of Student Affairs, the Psychological Health Education Center has been guided by the development trends of world-class university psychological health education, with the bottom line of maintaining school safety and stability with the goal of promoting students’ healthy growth and improving the quality of personnel training. It adheres to the working concept of “safeguarding safety, assisting growth and promoting development and continuously improving the psychological health education mechanisms”. The working model of “education, consultation, treatment, and research” has served the personnel training center work of the school in an all-round way and achieved good results.

Since 2013, the center has won three honors that provides the opportunity to strengthen construction, highlight the working pattern of “psychological health education” and put forward the core goal of its role for students of improving their psychological health. It takes the students’ psychological health education system and the construction of their mental core competence as its “Main Body”, and takes the prevention and treatment of common mental diseases and the construction of an emergency mental crisis intervention force and of students’ positive mental quality as its “Two wings”, that is, the idea of “One Body and Two Wings”.

According to the idea of “One Body, Two Wings”, the center has vigorously introduced clinical medical professionals to expand to providing full-time psychological teachers. Now it has formed a cooperative working alliance of psychologists, psychiatrists and counselors, highlighting the different advantages of various groups, and so promoting the movement and efficient cooperation of psychological health work. Based on the Tianjin supervision point of the registration system for professionals in clinical and consulting institutions of the Chinese Psychological Society, team building has been promoted, and high-level and high-density continuing education and training are provided to full-time and part-time psychological consultants in schools all the year round, effectively promoting crisis management level and incident handling capacity. With the aim of improving students' positive mental quality in an all-round way, Psychological Quality Development Bases have been built in Weijin Road campus and Peiyangyuan Campus of TJU, providing platform support for the construction of compulsory and extracurricular courses, peer psychological backbone teams, and daily psychological health activities for college students. They have now served more than 30,000 teachers and students in total.

The university psychological health education research and applied psychology personnel training model has made a breakthrough. Since the establishment of Institute of Psychology in 2003, the center has regarded clinical psychology as the core of its development and made efforts to realize the development model of “scientist-practitioner”. In 2007, the Master of Applied Psychology (MAP) started enrollment. Currently, it has enrolled for 10 sessions and has nearly 100 staff with a Master’s Degree in Applied Psychology. In 2018, a Master Degree in Applied Psychology was successfully approved, providing an effective way to improve the educational ability of full-time teachers majoring in psychology. This center actively encourages young full-time teachers to participate in the cultivation of graduate students majoring in applied psychology, enhancing the teacher’s sense of belonging to psychological health education, and laying a solid disciplinary foundation for the school to cultivate a young and professional full-time teacher working team that emphasizes science and practice.