Good psychotherapy will make your life better.

Good psychotherapy will make your life better.

Professor, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Zhiyan Chen, Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, Peking University, registered supervisor of Clinical and Consulting Committee of Chinese Psychological Society.

Beiqing Daily: Why do many patients disagree that they have psychological problems?

Zhiyan Chen: Unwilling to accept doctors' advice and refusing psychological clinics all indicate that our whole society needs to raise awareness of mental health. There is a mental illness, 99% patients will go to cardiovascular department for the first time, which is panic disorder. The main symptom is palpitation. Some people think it's tachycardia, chest tightness and a sense of dying, so many people will call an ambulance for the first time, and some people will go to the cardiovascular department for various examinations repeatedly, but they can't find the exact problem. At this time, an experienced cardiologist will recommend him for psychotherapy. And it has been proved that psychotherapy is very symptomatic and effective.

Panic disorder is an obstacle for anxious people. It is an anxiety that cannot be alleviated, and it becomes a strong attack after accumulation. The whole person is getting more and more nervous, breathing shorter and shorter, and his heart is beating faster and faster, so he is worried and afraid, so he is more nervous and his heart is beating faster. There's another hypochondria? A mental illness that always suspects that you are sick. The core of hypochondriac patients is to suppress and deny their emotions, so such patients refuse to go to psychological clinics.

Beiqing Daily: Do normal people also need to go to psychological counseling regularly?

Zhiyan Chen: I don't think it is necessary. But normal people have to do some very simple tests every year, such as sleep and depression, which are completed in a few minutes. If there is something wrong with the test, you can make a 20-question questionnaire to make an accurate judgment.

However, when you are obsessed with how to choose a school for your children, worry about making friends with your children, or find yourself in a new environment, you need to better adjust your mentality, including adjusting your life schedule to an optimal state, even losing weight and quitting smoking. You can seek the help of a psychological counselor, not necessarily suffering from mental illness, but you must always have a counseling goal. In fact, the current mental health law does not advocate psychological counselors to treat diseases.

Beiqing Daily: Psychological diagnosis uses questionnaires instead of instruments. Subjects will guess the intention of the question consciously or unconsciously, and even have hidden or untrue components. So, can the doctor's judgment be accurate?

Zhiyan Chen: The accuracy and authenticity of the test, on the one hand, lies in the preparation of the test, on the other hand, it is also related to the test environment. MMPI, a special classic of psychology, has four scales to measure your faking, including pretending to be good, pretending to be bad, pretending to be weird and so on. Psychological tests are sometimes very long, and the same question is asked in several ways, back and forth several times, just to reduce the error. There is more than one such classic test, which can detect your false interference. The second aspect is the purpose and environment of the test. If you are online, no one knows that you are answering this questionnaire. You just want to know if you are really depressed, and the answer will be more real.

In the detection of mental health, many of our tools are divided into short version and long version, and most of them are scientifically verified. For example, 7 questions in the short version of depression is enough, and 20 questions in the long version. The research proves that the correlation between the two is above 0.9, which means that the accuracy loss of the simplified version is not great.

Beiqing Daily: The means used in psychotherapy, including some analysis and judgment, will make people who have just come into contact feel a bit like games, less like science, and even a bit like fortune telling, astrology and tarot cards on the Internet.

Zhiyan Chen: Many psychological researches are scientific, but I personally think that psychotherapy is unscientific. It has been in the process of development, until today, we don't know how people have changed. Many great thinkers have discussed this problem, among which Edgar? Joseph Richmond EdgaLevenson holds that our theory may be wrong, but we can find effective ways to help people solve psychological problems through experience. This situation also exists in the history of medicine. You don't necessarily need the right principles to bring the right treatment. But the efficacy can be evaluated.

Joseph Richmond Levenson's book has a chapter about whether psychotherapy is therapy or persuasion. In some cases, persuasion can also bring curative effect. For example, if you agree with my explanation, then the symptoms will be fine. This is persuasion, not treatment. Paradoxically, when you want to have treatment, you really need the other person to accept your treatment principles. You can't cooperate with the treatment if you don't agree.

Beiqing Daily: Some tourists will ask? How did I become like this? Is it genetic, or is there something wrong with me? Should psychological counseling help people know themselves?

Zhiyan Chen: The core of psychotherapy is to make people become their true selves. In fact, many therapists value that people can live sincerely, not for others, but for themselves. Therefore, a patient wants to know who I am and how I became like this. I will cherish and respect his wishes very much, and I will discuss with him and share my understanding with him. But there are many problems involved here, so we can't go astray. Because some people find that their problems are inherited by their parents, or are related to their parents' upbringing when they were young, they will have a feeling of blaming their parents and being dissatisfied with their fate, which should be guarded against. In fact, psychotherapy is to make people responsible for their own lives.

As for heredity, it does affect people. Is this to prevent patients from having unrealistic wishes? If you are a neurotic person by nature, what you can do is that when you are nervous, you can adjust yourself to prevent it from ruining what you are doing, instead of not being nervous at all. That's an unreasonable goal.

Beiqing Daily: How is the level of psychological counselors divided?

Zhiyan Chen: A large part of the evaluation of counselors is the personal feelings of visitors. Only the actual test can know the level of a therapist. For example, do you think this therapist understands the core of your problem? Did you get any new news from him? Because the treatment is effective, it actually makes people have a new integration and new understanding of the past; The change of behavior comes from the change of view.

Psychotherapy is really difficult to evaluate, and it is impossible to judge the therapeutic effect simply from the improvement speed of superficial symptoms. If a person's change is under the pressure of a therapist, that's not good. A good change will make people feel that their ability to adjust their emotions is stronger, and the angle of thinking is bigger and stronger. This is the change they want.

Beiqing Daily: Is the counseling time long?

Zhiyan Chen: It does take a long time. Different schools have different definitions of short-term treatment. Psychoanalysis defines short-term treatment as less than 50 times, and cognitive therapy generally treats a problem 10-30 times. Two or three times is usually not enough to solve an exact theme.

Beiqing Daily: Tell your family or friends that you are unhappy or hit a pillow, can it play a psychological counseling role?

Zhiyan Chen: Studies have proved that people can seek social support and chat with family and friends, which is good for their mental health. This is beneficial and risk-free. It is risky to hit the pillow, which may have bad consequences. Because, this shows that you haven't learned to adjust your emotions.

Now the international community has begun to provide psychological self-help training through special websites. For example, there is a fixed program: introduce the principle and tell you where the core of the problem lies. You can practice step by step and then evaluate your emotional state every once in a while. Studies have shown that this treatment is equivalent to seeking psychological counseling.

Beiqing Daily: Is there such a website in China now? Is there a charge?

Zhiyan Chen: There are also teachers in our psychological college who are developing and promoting it. Last year, we wrote a policy proposal to the country, hoping to establish a mental health training website specifically for college students. With the psychological self-help website, at least to some extent, the problem of uneven psychotherapists can be avoided. This kind of self-help training website has both fees and free. However, some people think that charging has a better supervision effect. ;