Children's Mental Health Questionnaire

The Children's Mental Health Questionnaire is not a yardstick for diagnosing "mental illness". It is just a set of auxiliary tools to help adults capture children's hidden emotional signals. There is no absolute "passing line". Non-professionals must not label children as "depressed", "hyperactive" or "rebellious" based on the score of a questionnaire.

I met a mother in the clinic last week. Her eyes were swollen like walnuts. She dragged in a third-grade boy who was playing with his clothes. She said that the day before, she saw someone sharing a "Child Psychological Self-Assessment Form" in the parent group. She took the child and took it through it. The score showed "moderate anxiety." She was so scared that she didn't sleep all night, and she even thought about the plan to drop out of school. I took the questionnaire she saved and looked at it twice, and I couldn't laugh or cry - it was a self-report scale designed for teenagers over 12 years old. It contained words like "social avoidance" and "generalized anxiety". An 8-year-old child couldn't even understand the meaning. He chose "completely consistent". It was just that he had an awkward situation with his deskmate last week and didn't want to play with him during those two days.

To be honest, I have encountered this kind of mistake no less than ten times in the past six months. People’s misunderstanding of children’s psychological questionnaires is really too deep. There are two completely different approaches to the use of such tools in the academic world, and there is no one who is absolutely correct: Researchers who follow the evidence-based approach insist that the formally available child psychological questionnaires must be revised with localized norms and have clear testing age ranges and reliability and validity data. For example, the commonly used Rutter Child Behavior Questionnaire and Conners Parent Scale must be operated by trained professionals, and the scores can only be used as one of the reference items for clinical diagnosis, and cannot be used as a separate criterion at all. On the other hand, some child psychologists with a humanistic orientation feel that the excessive pursuit of standardized questionnaires is too cold. Many children get nervous when they see "filling out forms" and "doing questions" and cannot tell the truth at all. It is better to change the questionnaire to a semi-open "whisper list", such as "Has your chest been tight when you think about anything recently?" ”“If you could be an animal for a week, what would you choose? ”, on the contrary, you can dig out more real emotions.

I worked with a psychology teacher at a public primary school for one semester before, and she was very smart in her approach. She never gave children printed questionnaires as homework. Instead, she broke down the questions in the scale into casual chatter on the way to school. She could ask three or four questions in the time it took to pick up the children in line, and the information collected was much more accurate than a formal form. Once she was chatting with a little girl who always came first in exams and casually asked, "Is there anything that has made you feel particularly tired recently?" ”, the child was silent for a long time and said, "Every time I take second place in the exam, I am afraid that my mother will not want me." Later, I found out that her parents were getting divorced every day during that time and told the child, "We will not separate as long as you obey." The child pretended to be sensible and cheerful for more than half a year. If she hadn't asked so casually, no one would have discovered the panic hidden under her smiling face.

Don't tell me, many parents think, "My children are jumping around and having fun every day, why are we testing this?" In fact, children's emotional expressions are different from adults. Depression in adults is mostly due to low mood, while children may show irritability, love throwing things, sudden decline in grades, or even always complain of headaches and stomachaches. Go to the hospital for a checkup but no organic problems can be found. These signals are hidden in daily life and are difficult to detect. The questionnaire is meant to help you find clues, not to sentence the child to "death".

Nowadays, many people are opposed to schools conducting psychological screening for all employees. They feel that using a unified questionnaire is too crude. If a child is labeled as having a "psychological problem," it will cause secondary harm. This worry is really not unnecessary. I have heard before that some schools sent the list of children with high screening scores directly to the class teacher. The class teacher turned around and said to the class, "So-and-so has some mental problems, please let him go." As a result, the child was isolated from the whole class. It was just a mild adjustment problem at first, but in the end he actually developed social difficulties.

After all, this thing is like a children's height and weight comparison chart. If your child is two centimeters shorter than the standard value, can it be directly determined to be malnourished? Maybe it's just a matter of growing older. When I do questionnaires for my children, I always like to change the last question to "What do you most want to talk to me about now that you haven't said before?" ”, often the answer to this question is more useful than the combined scores of the previous dozens of questions. After all, what can really judge whether a child is happy or not is never the score on the questionnaire. It is whether you squat down and listen carefully to his endless little troubles about ants moving and the ending of cartoons.