Mental Healthcare In China

In May 2011 I had an opportunity to co-lead a training on Anxiety Disorders in Shanghai, China. While there I took the opportunity to interview two of the leading mental health specialists in China: Dr. Xu Yong, the Director of Education and Training at the Shanghai Mental Health Center and at the Medical School of Jiaotong University; and Dr. Jianping Wang a Professor at the school of psychology at Beijing Normal University, and the Vice Director of the Department of Clinical Psychology at Capital Medical University in China.

Dr. Yong: For a long time, treatment approaches for people with mental illness in China have predominantly used a hospital-based service model, and institutionalization and psychiatric and pharmacological treatment were mainly provided. The services delivered by clinical psychologists, social workers and occupational therapists were mostly unavailable. The over-reliance on the organic-medical approach to mental health care has yielded a narrow emphasis on symptom relief rather than recovery and improvement of life quality and social function. There is a huge gap between the supply and the demand of psychological intervention for mental disorders. I believe CBT, an evidence-based psychological intervention, can help us to bridge the gap.

Dr. Wang, you completed a three-year training in the United States learning Cognitive Behavior Therapy. What is your view of the role of Cognitive Behavior Therapy in mental health care in China? What are the differences you see in how Cognitive Behavior Therapy is practiced in the United States versus China?

Dr. Wang: Over the past 20 years, some people in China claimed to have been using CBT; however, their home-grown practices are a far cry from what CBT really is. In a sense, CBT only got started in China in the past 3 years (the first CBT conference in China was held in 2008). Since then, clinicians and students in universities started to become more interested in taking training courses and participating in workshops to learn real CBT.

The differences in practicing CBT between in US and in China are big in many ways. Generally speaking, CBT in the United States