Mental health C certificate

The full name of the Mental Health C Certificate is the C-level Qualification Certificate for Mental Health Education Teachers in Primary and Secondary Schools. It is an entry-level job certificate for mental health education set up by the domestic education system for all head teachers and subject teachers. It is only valid within the local education system. It is neither equivalent to the professional qualification certificate of a psychological counselor, nor can it be used as a job admission certificate for full-time psychological teachers.

Last month, when I was helping the teaching and research office of a public primary school in Guangzhou organize training materials for class teachers, I met a Chinese teacher who had just been employed for half a year. He was confused by the training notice and asked if he could change his profession to become a full-time psychology teacher after taking this certificate. Many people would confuse it with other certificates in the psychology industry. In fact, the education department The mental health qualification certificate within the system is divided into three levels. The C certificate is the most basic one that is universally available to all employees. It is equivalent to a "psychological first aid kit" for front-line teachers. You do not need to perform complex intervention surgeries, as long as you can identify common abnormal signals, understand basic communication boundaries, and know when to refer to professionals.； The B certificate is the entry threshold for full-time psychology teachers, and generally requires psychology-related majors to apply. The A certificate is an advanced certification for senior psychology teachers and psychological teaching researchers, and is more than one order of magnitude more difficult.

I have been exposed to the examination requirements in several regions such as Guangdong, Zhejiang, Sichuan, etc. The differences are not small, and the overall threshold is not high: most of them are online and offline trainings of about 40 hours organized by the education bureau. The content cannot avoid the identification of common psychological problems of students, preliminary intervention of campus psychological crises, and the design of mental health classes. The assessment is usually a theoretical written test plus a micro-lecture of about 10 minutes. The pass rate in most areas can be over 90%. If the school organizes it uniformly, you don’t even have to pay the registration fee.

In fact, the controversy about this certificate has never stopped. I have seen two completely opposite views. I can’t say who is right and who is wrong. The vice-principal of moral education in a public primary school in Shenzhen is a staunch supporter. He told me before that in the past two years at his school, there was a second-grade child who tore up books every day in class and couldn't sit still. The previous class teacher had no knowledge of the matter, so he just thought it was a naughty child, and asked the parents to stop him. It didn't work. Later, the class teacher went to take the C certificate and happened to learn the preliminary identification content of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). With the mentality of giving it a try, he reminded the parents to take their children to the hospital for investigation. As expected, early detection and early intervention made the child's condition much better after half a semester. In his opinion, even if the training in some places is a formality, as long as it can make front-line teachers have more strings in their minds and not casually label children as "disobedient" or "hypocritical", the effect of this certificate will be achieved.

There are also many old head teachers with more than ten years of teaching experience who complain that this certificate is purely formalistic. I talked to a junior middle school teacher in Foshan a while ago. She rolled her eyes while flipping through the training record and said that their local training is based on the duration of the class and the exams are all open. The answers to the papers are ready-made, and the courseware is still old content from five or six years ago. If you encounter a student with a tendency to self-harm, you will not dare to use what you have learned. In the end, you have to transfer it to the school's full-time psychology teacher. Spending dozens of hours is not as good as revising two more sets of papers. Oh, by the way, there are still many organizations that use this certificate to trick teachers and even parents from off-campus training institutions to apply for the exam, saying that if they pass the exam, they can become child psychological counselors, and charge thousands in training fees. It is pure deception - this certificate is only recognized within the education system, and it is not even a stepping stone after leaving school.

To be honest, I don’t think there is any need to praise this certificate too highly or kill it with one blow. If you are already a class teacher or subject teacher in a primary or secondary school, and the school requires you to take the exam, it won’t take much energy anyway. Even if you just remember "don’t talk openly about your child’s mental state in front of the whole class" and "don’t make blind suggestions and refer questions when you are unsure", these two points can avoid a lot of unnecessary problems.； If you want to rely on this certificate to enter the psychological counseling industry, or apply for a full-time psychological teacher, then give up the idea as soon as possible, and the time saved to study two more professional schools will be more useful than this.

After all, the value of this certificate has never been on the plastic paper. Last year, I met a math teacher who passed the C certificate. I met a girl who was hiding in the corridor crying because she failed in the exam. I didn’t say the phrase that everyone is tired of hearing, “Just try harder next time.” He knelt down and handed her a tissue and said, "I failed the exam last time for my professional title. I hid in this corner and cried for half an hour." At that moment, it didn't matter whether she had learned the answer template or how many points she got in the certificate exam. Having that sense of empathy was stronger than anything else.