Youth Health Service Center

The core value of the Youth Health Service Center has never been a single-point diagnosis and treatment station that "treats headaches and feet," but is a youth growth support hub that covers all dimensions of physical, psychological, and behavioral development and connects schools, families, and society. This is the firmest conclusion I have come to after visiting relevant institutions in 17 prefectures and cities across the country and talking to more than 60 frontline social workers and doctors.

Last Wednesday, I was staying at the center of a certain district in southern Jiangsu. As soon as I entered the door, I bumped into a boy in the second grade of junior high school wearing a blue and white school uniform. He clutched his schoolbag strap and waited at the door for three minutes. Finally, the social worker at the front desk handed him a glass of ice lemonade and pulled him in. He wasn't here to prescribe cold medicine - after having a fight with his parents last week, he had been suffering from insomnia for a week and was always distracted in class. The PE teacher touched his back and found that his shoulders were a bit uneven, so he immediately asked him to come here after school.

To be honest, there is still no unified standard answer to the positioning of such centers in the industry.

One group is a staunch "medical priority" group, which believes that the health problems of teenagers must first be addressed by physical symptoms that are tangible and tangible: myopia, scoliosis, obesity, physiological confusion in adolescence, etc., are all high-frequency needs, and there is no need to deal with them in vain. The center in Longhua District, Shenzhen follows this logic. It is directly staffed with resident physicians in pediatrics, nutrition, ophthalmology, and orthopedics. It also opened a green referral channel with nearby tertiary hospitals. In half a year, it received more than 3,200 cases of children with health risks. The early intervention rate for scoliosis alone increased by 47%. It has effectively solved the problem of "difficulty in taking children to see a doctor and asking for leave" for many parents.

The other school of thought is just the opposite, and belongs to the "development-first school": they believe that most physical problems are essentially an extension of behavioral and psychological problems - myopia may be caused by children who are stressed and stay up late to study exams, scoliosis may be caused by hiding in the room for a long time playing games with wrong posture, or even repeated abdominal pain and headaches. No organic problems can be found in the hospital, which is essentially a somatic reaction of anxiety. The center in Gongshu District, Hangzhou, did just that. It simply converted half of the clinics into sandbox rooms, board game areas, and recording studios. Half of the staff were registered psychologists and half were social workers who had just graduated a few years ago and could talk to children. Last year, it intervened in 217 cases of moderate to severe depression warnings. The self-harm reporting rate among teenagers in the jurisdiction dropped by 12.3%. When the data was released, even the skeptical leaders of the Education Bureau had nothing to say.

I had a conversation with Xiao Zhou, a social worker who was born after 1995 at the center. She looked through the case records on her phone and smiled bitterly, saying that actually both groups are right, but the most difficult thing is never the choice of model, but the parents’ cognition. Last month, there was a little girl who was a freshman in high school. She had been evaluated here three times and was diagnosed with moderate depressive disorder. Her mother came to see us for the first time. The first thing she said was not to ask how the child was doing, but "Can you please persuade her to stop being so pretentious and go back to school quickly? The class placement test is about to take place."

Now many places have begun to try to blur the boundaries between the two factions and implement "threshold-free access." For example, I visited a center in Yuexiu, Guangzhou. The first floor is a regular physiological screening clinic, and the second floor is a psychological and growth support area. You don’t need to register or bring your ID card when you enter, and you don’t even need to report your real name. You just need to fill in a simple screening form with only 3 questions: Have you been feeling unwell lately? Is there anything unhappy recently? Do you want to talk to someone first or get checked first?

There are even children who come to play with the center’s PS5 and borrow comic books, and no one stops them. Xiao Zhou told me about one of the most impressive cases: There was a boy in the third grade of junior high school who came to play a two-hour racing game every Saturday for three consecutive weeks. After playing for the fourth time, he casually told the social worker who was accompanying him that he had been blocked in an alley by some classmates in the class and robbed money three times. He did not dare to tell his parents for fear that they would scold him for being useless. Later, the center contacted the school's moral education department, the police station in the jurisdiction, and the child's parents, and it took half a month to completely solve the problem. The child continued to come frequently, and has now been admitted to a key local high school. Occasionally, he will come back to serve as a volunteer and play with younger children.

In fact, if you do this for a long time, you will find that there is no need to worry about which model is "correct". For children, a place where they don’t label themselves as “problem students”, where they don’t easily tell teachers and parents about themselves, where someone smiles and greets them when they come in, and where no one cares if they want to play games, is a kind of support in itself.

Of course, many centers are still trying to cross the river by feeling the stones. In some places, there are many left-behind children, so nutritional screening and safety education must be put at the forefront.； In some places, the pressure of going to school is high, and the need for emotional counseling and stress relief is even higher. There is no one-size-fits-all template. The only criterion is actually very simple: after school, are any children willing to take the initiative to walk here?