A Experimental Study Of The Yuehong Group Sandtray Play On Mental Health In Senior Pupil

The parents,schools,society,and the government have paid much attention to the mental health education of middle school and primary school.Many schools have adopted or set up their own working mode of mental health education models.But using sandplay in school work is just a start.Some schools use individual sandplay or individual oriented group sandplay mostly.The sandplay therapists appraise the effect by psychoanalyze the sandplay works,and it requires advanced professional skills to do so.Therefore,there is a limitation for such sandtray models to be generalized into the school mental health educational work. After the "May 12th Sichuan earthquake" of 2008,the author received a systematic training from the developer of a collaborative group sandtray:Yuehong Group Sandplay.Yuehong's Group Sandplay doesn't emphasize psychoanalysis of the participants or their sandtray works,instead,it focuses on participation,experiential process,acceptance,and encouragement skills.It's quite practical and easy to be operated by the therapist .This research attempts to investigate the feasibility and validity of Yuehong Group Sandplay in promoting primary school students' mental health,and explore methods to generalize such Group Sandtray Play model in the school mental health curriculum. Literature review indicated that regardless of the metal health status,interpersonal relationships,and adaptation skills remain the major challenges of primary schoolers. Hence,this research chose 50 at-risk students ranging from grade 4 to grade 6 in a primary school of Chengdu City to participate in 8 weekly 60-minute sessions of Yuehong Group Sandplay.After 8 sessions of group sandplay,the 50 students in the experimental group and another 50 children in the control group were tested by the MHT.The results indicated no significant difference between both groups on the Tendency of self-blame,however,a significate improvement on study anxiety,anxiety toward person,tendency of loneliness etc.and the general level of anxiety was found on the experimental group when comparing with the control group.Comparison of the pre-post questionnaires and interviews from the parents and teachers indicated that the children in the experimental group transferred what they learned from the group sandplay sessions to their daily life at home and school,suggesting the verlidity,reliability,and generalizability of Yuehong Group Sandplay.This research shows the collaborative model of Yuehong Group Sandplay can effectively impact the school mental health education, is practical and easy apply and be dynamically integrated into the school curriculum.