First official intern, an experience in psychological counseling office

🎉 Congratulations to myself on finishing my first internship!

At the end of June, after the audition, I engaged in a summer internship that works at a Chinese mental counseling office. The office is pretty small, with only around twenty to thirty counselors. The experience had been fun and meaningful to me, and here are some getaways I got from this summer.

(The sharing is completely based on my personal experience, they are not objective. Since they are quiet personal thoughts, I went share the name of the office and any information about it.)

When I was younger, and when I told my parents’ friends that I wanted to learn psychology in the future, none of them had concerns about my career. They all thought that “psychology” was a new starting major and “psychological counselor” was a new starting career path, so that it was still progressing and there would be countless opportunities for young people. However, now I feel like this might be wrong. Because the culture of China that had been formed over two thousand years can’t be changed easily, people never had the concept that they need to reach out for help about their “emotional” or “mental” issues, and most people don’t understand why they should have someone to help them. Even some of the people are ashamed of it.

“Psychology” might be new for China, but it isn’t for the world, so for the past years, why hasn’t “psychology” been introduced into Chinese culture? Because it is fairly hard to do so, and without people adapting to the existence of therapists, though “psychology” is an unsaturated major, it will never be saturated like other careers.

Even my peer friends don’t want to hang out with another friend who has depression. What could we expect from those elderly people, those who have the power of consumption?

However, I’m not stating that there is completely no one who would consume this service; in fact, there are a great number of people who would love to reach out for help and connect with therapists. As mentioned earlier, regarding the general environment and opinion from society about this career, it has rendered this industry very fragmented. People who yearn for it couldn’t gain a deeper understanding of what “psychology” is and what being a “therapist” requires; people who don’t, or think they don’t need it, perceive this industry as unpresentable. It has made this industry look like some sort of underground business.

Speaking from another perspective, which is looking at the counselors’ perspectives, the counselors in this office gave me the feeling as if they didn’t know what they were doing.

One of them said that they feel like their inner core is only three years old and is still growing; one of them said that they rely on their unmarried partner to support the family, and they are still chasing their dreams; one of them couldn’t stop smoking even when we were in the steering committee.

In conclusion, none of them started with a psychology major; being a “therapist” is only a part-time job for most of them to earn extra income.

NOTES!! I’m not saying this is the circumstance for all of them, not everyone in this career. These are just a few of them that I met; even though not everyone is like them, they let me capture that there is such a culture existing. This made me quite angry and agitated about it, so my wording might be a little aggressive.

I don’t know what we can do to change the circumstances, though it made me realize that there is still a far long way to go in succeeding in raising awareness among East Asians on mental well-being. I didn’t think that I would be a therapist in the future, neither before nor after this internship experience, though I am really glad that this summer I had the chance to learn more about my major and my passion.