An Intervening Study On Mental Health Status Of Private College Students

The private higher education has been vigorously growing in our country with reforming and opening-up. But the studies on the private college students' mental health status and mental health education were obviously limited. What is more, most existing studies were not only lack of comprehensiveness, but also lack of systematism and profoundity, which did not match with the rapid development of the private colleges. In this thesis, we attempted to make up the insufficiency of the study on the mental health education of private college students, to enrich the theory on the college students' mental health education, to provide reference for the mental health education of private college students and the administer of the students.Study 1: The research was made on the mental health status of 355 students from three private colleges in Shenyang, Dalian and Fushun and 145 students from a pulic college in Fushun. The following scales: Symptom Checklist 90 (SCL-90), The self-Esteem Scale (SES), Personal Evaluation Inventory (PEI) and Subjective Questionnaire were used in this research. Results followed: 1.Generally speaking, the overall level of the mental health of students in private colleges, their degree of self-esteem and self-confidence had no significant difference, compared with those of students in pubic colleges. This agreed with our study hypothesis. 2.Compared with public college students, students of private colleges had a certain degree of weakness in areas of obsessive compulsive, interpersonal sensitivity, hostility and paranoid ideation. As for those students themselves, the factors of higher mental problems were interpersonal sensitivity, obsessive compulsive, hostility, depression and paranoid ideation. It is hinted that the five aspects mentioned above are the weak links of the mental health of students in private colleges and are also the breakthrough keys in the future intervention.3.Results of the scales on SES and PEI showed that with respect to the self-esteem and self-confidence of students in private colleges, there were significant difference in gender and grade. The degree of self-esteem and self-confidence of famale students in private colleges was very obviously lower than that of male students. The degree of the self-esteem and self-confidence of the sophomore students was obviously lower than that of the freshman students, at the same time, their self-esteem degree was even lower than that of the junior students. Those results told us that we should pay more attention to the falmale college students and the sophomore students in the mental health education of students in the private colleges. Then we could increase the degree of their self-esteem and self-confidence so as to enhance their overall level of mental health. Study 2: Based on the study mentioned above, we chose 80 students from private colleges in Fushun as samples. They were equally divided into an intervention group and a control group on random. We still used SCL-90, SES and PEI as pre-test scales. Results showed that there was no significant difference between the two groups. Based on this, a comprehensive counseling model of the so-called "five-combination"— theoretical instruction, group counseling, individual counseling, the sharing of comprehension and compiling newspapers and magazines—had been applied to the intervention group for 9 weeks. Three months after the intervention ended, a follow-up study was conducted.The conclusion of this study we got from the comprehensive counseling model of "five combination" has shown a significant promotion action for enhancing the level of self-esteem of the students in private colleges, for strengthening their self-confidence and protecting their mental health. Moreover, such a model had obvious effects in the near future. It showed that such a counseling model was suitable for the students in private colleges and it could improve the students' mental health status.