Media
A stronger mental health support system for Chinese students overseas.
Language barriers, cost and long waits for appointments make it harder for Chinese students to get professional help.
Research on Chinese students
- Moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms
- 24.5%
- Moderate-to-severe anxiety symptoms
- 20.7%
Nearly one in four Chinese students in the US has moderate-to-severe depressive symptoms.
Pandemic-era screening of 1,881 Chinese students at US universities · Lin et al., PLOS One, 2022
Of every 100 Chinese students, 54 had high psychological distress
Of those 54, 5 had used a mental health service in the past year
144 Chinese students in Australia, assessed with the K10 and shown per 100 students; the barriers they named include cost, language and not knowing what services exist · Lu et al., Counselling Psychology Quarterly, 2014
Language barriers are a major obstacle to Chinese students getting professional help.
Among 433 Chinese students in the US, those with higher English proficiency were more willing to seek help · Ma et al., Health Communication, 2022
Yoren’s position
Mental health support should be an integral part of studying abroad
Yoren calls on universities, study-abroad agencies and national education authorities to take the mental health of Chinese students seriously and to include Chinese-language mental health support in student services. Language barriers often lead to academic difficulty, and academic pressure in turn leads to psychological distress, so students need language and academic support as well.
Experts and founder
Yoren provides leading psychiatric consultation and counselling for Chinese students worldwide. Its core clinical team comes from hospital psychiatry departments ranked among China’s top ten by Fudan University and includes psychiatrists at the two highest clinical grades in Chinese hospitals, experienced counsellors, counsellors holding China’s national Level 2 psychological counsellor qualification, and counselling supervisors who train and oversee other counsellors.
- Professor Xiangyang ZhangHe is Xinghua Chair Professor at Tsinghua University, Chief Scientist for Mental Health at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and President of the Overseas Chinese Psychiatric Association. Licensed to practise psychiatry in China and the United States, he was a tenured associate professor of psychiatry at Baylor College of Medicine and an attending psychiatrist at UTHealth Houston, after research posts at Yale School of Medicine. He has published more than 750 SCI-indexed papers and has been listed among the world’s top 2% of scientists for five consecutive years.
- Dr Liu ShuangchenHe is a leading psychiatrist at a hospital ranked among China’s top ten for psychiatry by Fudan University, holds China’s highest clinical grade and has four decades of clinical experience. He specialises in treatment-resistant insomnia, severe depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, adolescent mental disorders and other complex psychiatric conditions. A registered forensic psychiatric assessor and an expert member of Beijing’s psychiatric assessment committee, he has completed more than 3,000 forensic psychiatric assessments. He contributed to two Ministry of Education psychiatry textbooks for medical students and has published more than 30 papers in core journals.
- Dr Gao ShiyuanA senior mental health expert with nearly four decades of clinical experience, he is a Clinical Expert at Tsinghua University Counseling Center and a re-appointed expert at a hospital ranked among China’s top ten for psychiatry by Fudan University, where he formerly headed a clinical department. He initiated a national programme integrating psychiatric care and psychotherapy and was named an Outstanding Lecturer in China’s first national Good Doctor awards. He works with students and adolescents on study pressure, relationships, anxiety, depression and other emotional and behavioural problems.
- Jichuan LiuFounder of Yoren. He read Philosophy and Politics at the University of Edinburgh and interned in the House of Lords with an Opposition frontbench spokesperson. He researched international relations at the Global Governance Institution and the Grandview Institution in Beijing; as programme manager in Grandview’s International Cooperation Department, he ran Track 1.5 and Track II dialogues.
Clinical team and credentials → Professor Xiangyang Zhang, Tsinghua University → Fudan specialty ranking →
Media contact
For coverage, materials or interviews, contact service@yoren.co. The founder and Professor Zhang give interviews in Chinese and English.
To submit an article for publication, see Write for Yoren.