An Analysis of Promoting Mental Health Education of the University Students

Mental Health Education of university students is the basis for cultivating talents with overall qualities and a historic task of higher education. This paper explains the concept of mental health and the significance of promoting it of the university students, analyzes the current status of psychological problems, and explores the measures taken to promote the mental health of the university students.


Promoting mental health is an effective way to improve the overall quality of the college students
Mental quality is the comparatively stable inner psychological characteristics, including spiritual appearance, temperament, personality, emotion and other psychological factors.It is the basis for the other qualities to shape and develop.Students' growing and seeking knowledge is essentially a continuous process of mental activities and psychological development.Only through individual choice and internalization, can cultural knowledge through education permeate into the individual's personality to make it grow up.This process is also the one for individual psychological quality to improve continuously.The enhance of the overall quality of college students, in large part, is affected by the psychological quality.The cultivation of all the qualities should take psychological quality as an intermediary.The formation and development of creative awareness, self-personality, competitiveness, adaptability should take the psychological quality as a guide.In the complex social environment, maintaining a good psychological adaptation is the key to resist temptation, endure setbacks and realize self-regulation.In this sense, it can be said that the strength of overall quality of college students depends much on their psychological quality and the results of their mental health.

Mental health is the fundamental driving force for the personality development
Mental health education is closely related to the personality development of the students.It directly affects the development of individual personality.On the one hand, college students can gradually improve their own personality structure with ethics, behavior, environmental information, social expectations they have received in the process of mental health education.On the other hand, the objective values, as a measure, evaluation and adjustment in psychological life also affect the development of the students.They can be transformed into personal traits under certain conditions, thus the personality development will reach a new height.At the same time, mental health education is not passively attached to this transformation, but in the transformation process dynamically guides the learners to adjust the direction, make themselves understood to make a correct evaluation of themselves in order to achieve the mental health and sound character.

Promoting mental health is a reliable way to develop the potentials of the students
One of the purposes to promote mental health is to develop the potentials in the learners.Good psychological quality and potential development are the premise to reinforce each other.Mental health education can provide a necessary condition for their harmonious development.It can trigger the self-confidence of the learners, help them at a higher level to grasp themselves to achieve the role conversion, the development of ability to adapt to the environment, eventually fully demonstrate the potentials.

Status quo of psychological problems in college students
College students, generally speaking are at the age of 18 to 22 years old.They are in the middle or late of puberty.In this period, the gap of physical maturity and psychological innocence results in mental conflict and imbalance.It is the peak of psychological problems (Li. 1995. p.32), for example, psychological conflict from the changes of the roles or environment, anxieties caused by learning tension, emotional disorders caused by bad relationships; emotional distress from love matters, psychological problems of job pressure, low self-esteem psychology for the reason of economic deprivation, etc.It is helpful for us to design appropriate educational measures as to the major causes of mental health problems of the college students at the present times (Wang. 2004. pp. 85-87).

Effective methods to promote the mental health of the college students
Strengthening the mental health education needs a trinity of educational environment of the community, family and school.Meanwhile, college students themselves are needed to strengthen self-education and self-adjustment.Only in this way, can good results be achieved.

Improve the mechanism of mental health education
Mental health education is a systematic project.In order to make it run orderly, a high efficient mechanism of mental health education should be created.On the basis of analyzing the problems in the current psychological quality of the college students, I propose that colleges or universities should emphasize and strengthen the psychological health education, and develop the educational activities in many aspects (Zhao. 2002. pp.88-89).Mental health education should be considered to be an important part of the ideological and political work and moral education.Effective measures should be taken to support it in the respects of manpower, material and financial resources (Guo, 2007, pp. 107-108).

Carrying out a variety of activities and building a good atmosphere of the campus culture
Rich and various campus cultural activities are effective carriers to train the positive characters and make them healthily develop.They can cultivate the personalities and purify the mind so we should create the conditions and let the Communist Youth League or student organizations play important roles in carrying out diverse and healthy campus activities.We should take the initiative to occupy positions in campus culture to provide elegant, healthy and varied spiritual food for the majority of the college students.
Campus culture is an important carrier to carry out mental health education for college students.A good cultural atmosphere on campus will be imperceptible to optimize the psychological quality of the students.Its function should be more emphasized to enhance self-awareness and continuously improve the self-survival, self-control, self-development and self-cognitive abilities.Rich, various, healthy and lively cultural activities on campus should be held and internet culture should be further studied and controlled in case that the decayed or the corrupted pollute the spirits of the students.Constructing the campus culture and creating a positive, healthy, and civilized culture campus can elevate the students' psychological consciousnesses, sublimate their perception, exercise their wills in a beautiful, healthy campus environment so as to obtain healthy mental quality withstanding the test of time.

Strengthening physical exercises
When the psychological health problems are solved, influences of physical exercises on the mental health can not be ignored for any other means or method can not replace it.First, physical activity is an effective means to enhance the mental health of the students.Secondly, basketball, volleyball, soccer, jogging and aerobics have different functions of regulation for those students with psychological problems.Especially, they can distinctly improve the depressive disorders.Volleyball and jogging are of the more significant to anxiety while basketball, volleyball and soccer have visible regulatory function for interpersonal sensitivity.Thirdly, colleges or universities should pay attention to the mental health of students, change the traditional concepts of health and establish modern health conception.They should let the students form good sporting habits, set up the lifelong sporting concept and make physical exercises effectively promote mental health (Wang, 2005, pp 56-58).

Attention should be paid to the ideological and political education
Ideological and political education in colleges or universities must adopt the people-oriented idea.Ideological and political education itself is a comprehensive and three-dimensional project, and mental health education should become an important part of it.The ideological and psychological characteristics of college students should be studied.There are two perspectives.One is to sub-grades to grasp the psychological characteristics of the students of the low grades.The other is to master the psychological characteristics of different groups according to different ages.Further studies should be carried out compared with the youth of other lines or in other historical periods.Education of ideals and beliefs should be strengthened.It should be taken as a core to improve ideological and political quality of college students and solve the problems in belief and orientation of value in order to guide them to establish a correct world outlook and value.Combining with ideological and psychological reality of the contemporary college students and helping then to keep a positive mental outlook and the state of healthy mind and consciously create a civilized and progressive image of the contemporary college students, we can develop their sense of professionalism and social responsibility to lay the foundation for their lifelong development (Liu, 2005, pp. 22-23).

Institutions for mental health education should be established and regular surveys and studies about mental health should be implemented
To comprehensively understand the psychological state of the college students is an effective way to improve the purpose and effectiveness of mental health education.Classifications should be made according to the different grades and genders of the college students, studies about the psychological problems should be carried out consciously.Summarization, organization, positive and proactive approaches or measures should be adopted to deal with the potential problems.Inter-schools or inter-department information exchanges should be strengthened to prevent problems that may arise among students.Measures or methods in dealing with psychological problems should also be exchanged.In order to popularize mental health education, universities must establish a specialized mental health educational institution, an organization with functions of teaching, research and counseling, to undertake the task of training and investigating, to set up psychological records and conduct psychological consultations and treatment and so on.Second, teaching staff should be strengthened.Functions of the political counselors should be given full play to promote the mental health and improve their psychological quality.Training should be actively given to those professional or amateur teachers engaged in mental health education.Professional training also should be given to the class teachers and other cadres or teachers involved in the mental health education.

Constructing three layers of security network
Three safety net of mental health of the college students are mental health education network, network of psychological counseling, mental illness prevention and intervention network.They will implement the policy of psychological health education of the college students and will do real things for them.Mental Health Education Network means that mental health education should be conducted to all the students to improve their understanding of the mental health problems so as to nurture high-quality professionals.Network of Psychological Counseling and Guidance is constituted by those specially trained and qualified consultants with mental experience.They will carry out the examination of mental health, set up psychological files fro the students, conduct psychological consulting for individuals or groups and some other work of purposeful psychological measurement or research supported by some relevant expertise, political managers or some students.Network of mental illness prevention and intervention is constituted by the school counseling room, student office, people in charge of the student work of each department head, class instructor, Division of Security and other related staffs.It cooperates with mental clinics of the related hospitals to give common concern for mental health work of the college students.

Self-education should be advocated
The purpose of education can be achieved only after it is transformed into the dynamic activities of the learners themselves.Education can establish the subjective consciousness and reflect the participation of the subject.Therefore, mental health education of college students must advocate the subjective self-education, promote the discontinuous reinforcement of mental health self-awareness and the methods of psychological self-adjustment to remove the negative psychological confusion and agree with the complex changes in social life.In short, college students should consciously regulate their emotions to face the difficulties in a positive and strong attitude and keep their mind in balance.
In short, cultivating trans-century talents is a historical task of the colleges or universities entrusted by the times.How to develop cross-century talents?The core is to strengthen the basic quality of the young students.
High-quality people should have good ideological and moral qualities, scientific and cultural and physical qualities, and good mental quality.Excellent psychological quality plays an important role in improving overall qualities of the young students and produces a positive and profound impact on the quality of the personnel.Maintaining a healthy attitude involves not only the physical health, psychological development, the shape of the good moral character and the cultivation of the perfect personalities of majorities of students but also the overall quality of the talents, the full realization of higher education goals and the smooth progress of modernization construction.