A recent campus serial murder, hyped up by the media into an event in China, has aroused concern about psychological pressure on college students in the country.

The top three causes of psychological problems were failure in examinations, difficulty in paying tuition and disappointment in love. Psychological pressures also came from job hunting, acute competition for post-graduate education and love affairs, the sociologists note.

The growing number of college graduates is aggravating competition in the domestic labor market. This summer the number will reach about 2.8 million, as against 2.1 million last year, when only 7% of them found jobs, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Security.

“It seems that I would flare up and be driven to violence as soon as I saw a person wearing a smile,” said a student sumamed Zhang at the prestigious Hebei University of Science and Technology based in Shijiazhuang, capital city of north China’s Hebei province. He said he had attended 4 interviews at a human resources exchange fair in the city but failed to find an appropriate job opportunity.

Zhang was far from unique among his schoolmates. The ridiculous hostile mentality stemmed from the anxious or depressive illness of the job hunters who had just finished a dozen years of hard learning, according to a counselor with the Psychiatry Department of the No. 1 Hospital affiliated to the Hebei Medical University.

At present, most of the institutions of higher learning on the Chinese mainland concentrate on providing employment information for graduating students, says a counselor from a mental healthcare center for college students in Shijiazhuang. She believes that it is imperative to help the students to build a proper, healthy mindset before they step into society.

As more jobs require higher academic degrees in China, more college students are thronging into the competition for master’s degrees.

The acute competition imposed high pressure on the college students, and some of them depicted their feelings waiting for the outcome of the entry exams for higher education as “being tormented mentally”.

The psychological vulnerability has prompted an increasing number of college students to turn to mental healthcare services for help.

 In 2001, a group of psychologists good at college student problems sponsored a psychological counseling committee to train campus counselors in Hebei province.

One year later, a research council of college mental healthcare was jointly founded by 40 college and universities in the province at Hebei University, with the provincial education bureau as the major sponsor. With the help of the council, a well-equipped psychological counseling center has been set up at the same university, and opened two service hotlines, helping more than 200 students every year.

Identical services were launched earlier in some southern cities. The municipal education authority of Shanghai has worked out a detailed plan for the development of psychological counseling in the city, aiming to provide at least one counselor for every 1000 college students by the year 2005.

Meanwhile, the Provincial Education Bureau of Yunnan has recently arranged a survey of psychological health care for college students and demanded every institution of higher learning in the province set up mental healthcare files for their freshmen.