What is the use of the Child Mental Health Assessment Scale?

The core function of the Children's Mental Health Assessment Scale is to transform the originally abstract and difficult-to-capture children's mental state into a quantifiable and comparable reference basis, helping practitioners and parents reduce the probability of misdiagnosis of children's psychological problems.

I have been in child psychology clinics for almost five years, and the most common ones I encounter are parents who come in with questions. They either say, "My child keeps throwing things recently, does he have a temper problem?" or asks, "He can never sit still in class, does he have ADHD?" Relying solely on parents' fragmented descriptions, and because children often refuse to tell the truth when facing strangers, it is easy to mix "staged mood swings" and "pathological psychological problems" in a ten-minute face-to-face consultation. At this time, the scale is equivalent to giving us a unified measuring stick, and there will not be too much judgment bias due to differences in doctors' personal experiences.

But we now have a consensus in the industry that the scale score must not be regarded as the only criterion for judgment. Last month, I met a 7-year-old boy. When his parents brought him over, they brought him a hyperactivity scale taken in another hospital. The score was far above the critical value. The parents were already preparing to enroll him in an intervention class. I chatted with the child alone for twenty minutes before I found out that his parents were getting divorced a few months ago, and they were noisy at home every day. The child deliberately caused trouble in class and lost his temper at home, just to get his parents to divert their attention from the quarrels to him. It was not pathological hyperactivity at all. If the diagnosis had been made directly based on the results of the scale, the child would have been labeled "ADHD" for no reason, but he might actually have psychological problems.

In addition to outpatient screening, psychological teachers in schools often use scales. I used to have a cooperative primary school that would do a general test for children in grades three, four, and five every semester. Last year, a little girl who was usually very well-behaved was screened out and had a high score on the depression dimension. The teacher didn't believe it at first, saying that this child usually took classes seriously and never quarreled with his classmates. How could he be prone to depression? As a result of the home visit, we found out that the girl's grandmother was seriously ill and was hospitalized last month. Her parents went to the hospital every day and no one bothered to talk to her. She was too scared to speak out and kept it all in her heart. Later, the teacher talked to her twice a week, and her parents also adjusted their time to spend more time with her. Within two months, she was back to normal. If there were no scale screening, the emotional problems of such a child who usually "does not cause trouble" may not be discovered until something serious happens.

Of course, there are many people who object to casually administering psychological scales to children, and I completely agree with this. Nowadays, many unreliable institutions will randomly find an external scale that has not been revised for localization. After testing, they will label the child, saying that the child has autism or ADHD, and then sell an intervention course worth tens of thousands of yuan. This is not a problem with the scale, but because the people who use it are simply unqualified and unprofessional. To put it bluntly, the scale is just like a thermometer at home. If the temperature is high, it just means that you may be sick. Whether it is a cold or inflammation requires further examination by a doctor. Just because someone is using a thermometer to fool people, you can't say that the thermometer is useless, right?

In fact, in the final analysis, the Children's Mental Health Assessment Scale has never been a tool for labeling children. It is more like an emotional "searchlight" that can help us see the unspoken grievances, fears, and anxieties hidden behind children's behaviors. As for subsequent judgment and intervention, it always depends on the person using the tool, not the tool itself.