ASSIGNED TO MADAM PROFESSOR
Mental Health Problems among Chinese International University Students: A Literature Review
Introduction
With the development of our world, more and more people show their respect to cultural diversity and tend to learn new things particularly in the education system. With high-quality education and good, independent learning environment, the United States and other developed countries have become study centers and attract more and more foreign students study there for getting a better career in the future including Chinese students. According to a just-released report by the nonprofit Institute of International Education (IIE), during the 2014-2015 academic year, there are more than 974,000 international students currently in the United States. However, the number of Chinese students studying in the United States was 304,040, which is almost one-third of all the international students studying in the United States.
“Transition to university can be a dramatic life change for all young people”. For those students who just enter university, stress can come from many aspects like adapting to the new campus, socializing with new people, feeling homesick, studying difficulties and so on. “First year university students can experience elevated psychological distress (Fisher & Hood, 1987), and features of the new environment can interact with personality factors to precipitate psychological problems” (Fisher, Murray, & Frazer, 1985). Moreover, as absolute “aliens” in the United States, Chinese international students tend to suffer more than others. When I was in China, I saw many bad news and real things happen on Chinese international students. Last year, a survey released by a Chinese website called CollegeDaily which is very popular among overseas Chinese student was posted online. There are almost 7500 Chinese international participating in this survey, within the 7500 students, more than half of the participants (53%) voted for "have had the idea of committing suicide" option, and about 9% of the participants voted for the "friends around have had the idea of committing suicide" option. "Never thought of suicide" was less than 40%. Based on the statistics, it is not hard to see Chinese students are facing and suffering from a very difficult and depressed situation when studying overseas. Not only the culture shock, language barriers, more important factors are involved in their daily lives, as a result of mental health problems. Compared to high school or even more younger children, it is more likely for university students to feel stressed and depressed because they need to take more responsibilities for themselves and do more things independently.
In this article, I am going to review several published sociological research articles with regard to the mental health problems among Chinese students in order to analyzing the cause of the phenomenon “Chinese international student have mental health problems”. There are three sections in my literature review. In the first section, I will review the different sources of mental health problems experienced by them. The second section will focus on the effects of these mental health problems. After reviewing the effects, I will review the future solutions for dealing with Chinese mental health problems.
There are some unique sources of mental health problems for Chinese international students.
In Meirong Liu’s researcher paper, she concluded eight different reasons which are social interaction and communication problems, social support, social connectedness, filial piety, homesickness, academic difficulties, and additional factors contributing to mental health problems.
Social interaction and communication problems are root in the huge difference of history, social custom and culture. For example, Americans advocate individualism but Chinese people are taught to appreciate collectivism all the time, so Chinese tend to develop with trend of society instead of showing the uniqueness of themselves. In the West, people are defined by their uniqueness and separateness from others. In contrast, people in the east are defined by their similarity and connection with others. Hence, after coming to US, students from collectivistic cultural backgrounds may focus on close relationships, and they may feel confused when interacting with western students because they tend to emphasize individualism, such as independence, assertiveness, and self-reliance. (Zhang, 2007)
Another important factor contributing to mental health problems is filial piety. In most western country, the independence of family and equal status of each family member are prior to other aspects. Under this circumstance, American parents devote more time and money to their own lives other than children’s lives. As a result, there are not many duties for children to take. However, the tradition of China is to raise the young and support the elderly. People have responsibility and duty to take care of their parents when they become old, this is filial piety. Most Chinese international students experienced stress from filial piety due to the unbalance between parents and themselves. (Liu, 2009)
In addition to factors in students’ daily life, there are also some academic stressors among Chinese international students. Kunyan and David C. Berliner from the Arizona State University do research on the academic challenges faced by Chinese students. In their research, they point out Chinese students have pressure of cultural demand for educational excellence, language barrier, and incongruities in the educational system between China and the United States. In Chinese culture, people who are well-educated rank highly in the society, also they can get better career. To Chinese international students, academic achievements are not just a good diploma, but also only way to succeeding. So, oversea Chinese students would devote much more time studying than normal Americans. However, the language barrier sometimes becomes a big gap so that they cannot do well in learning. For instance, researches show Chinese students at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln have difficulties in academic writing. In terms of the incongruities in the educational system between China and US, the biggest difference is the studying style. In China, school will push you to study no matter if you want or not. What students need to do is only studying. Contrary to US, American schools give students full independence. In China, students even don’t need to choose courses because schools have already prepared everything for them. When the huge difference happen to Chinese international students, they cannot easily accept that they need to do everything on their own (Yan, 2017).
In another research paper, the writers focus on Chinese international students to examine the association between acculturative stress, depression and maladaptive perfectionism. Researches show that both acculturative stress and maladaptive perfectionism can contribute to depression among Chinese international students in some ways. First, acculturative stress is briefly defined as the stressors and difficulties coming from adapting the new environment due to culture shock. For Chinese international students having acculturative stress, when they face problems and troubles, they believe that handle these problems with their inner resources and self-control. Actually, some problems like discrimination by peers cannot be solved by themselves, which becomes a factor of depression. In this research, the writers also found that maladaptive perfectionism might be a vulnerable factor to depression as well. Because those Chinese international students with maladaptive perfectionism would pursue perfect performance in school work for honoring the family after coming back to China. At the same time, some students pay a lot of money to study aboard, so they cannot tolerate themselves to do imperfectly in school. However, difficulties like language barriers cannot to overcome easily sometime especially for Chinese students, when they achieve imperfect results after great devotion to class, depression can happen to them(Wei, Meifen, 2007).
