Psychology

Department of Psychology, Qilu Hospital of Shandong University

[Department Introduction]

The Psychological Outpatient Clinic of Qilu Hospital of Shandong University was established in 2002. It is a comprehensive specialty department with distinctive features, integrating medical care, teaching, and research. Equipped with psychological testing software widely used domestically and internationally, it can provide psychological diagnostic and assessment services, including tests of normal and abnormal personality, children's behavior and parenting styles, life events, marital quality, coping styles, and emotional states. The department operates through outpatient services and consultations within and outside the hospital. In addition to providing mental health services to the general public, it is primarily engaged in consultations on psychosomatic disorders among inpatients of our hospital. The department continues to grow and currently has significant influence among its counterparts within and outside the province.

The main instruments currently available in the department and their therapeutic features are:

1. EMG biofeedback therapy device: Patients voluntarily regulate muscle tension to alter the body's state of tension.

2. Aversion-stimulus therapy device: It combines aversive stimuli with undesirable behavioral habits to form a conditioned reflex, helping patients correct abnormal behaviors.

3. Brainwave therapy device: Using brainwave patterns in different functional states, it targets anxiety, depression, and changes in cognitive function through combined stimulation with sound frequencies, flashes of light, and acupoints; it achieves varying degrees of relaxation, restores normal brainwave patterns, and improves functions such as memory and attention.

4. T.O.V.A. system: Professional diagnosis and training for children with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). It is a professional computer software system for assessing attention and impulse-control abilities in normal individuals and clinical patients. It includes two subtests, visual and auditory, and can assess ADHD and attention from both visual and auditory perspectives. The T.O.V.A. system can distinguish attentional lapses (daydreaming) from difficulty controlling impulses (hyperactivity), thereby distinguishing the three clinical types of ADHD: predominantly inattentive/daydreaming type, predominantly hyperactive/impulse-control difficulty type, and combined type. This avoids the limitation of behavioral scales, which can only subjectively assess overt behavioral manifestations related to attention and cannot objectively assess attentional lapses and difficulty controlling impulses.

[Featured Subspecialties]

1. Psychological Counseling and Therapy Specialty

The main directions of psychological counseling and therapy are:

1) People in the general population who sometimes experience temporary emotional distress, strained interpersonal relationships, and life events that are difficult to cope with, affecting their psychosomatic health;

2) The diagnosis and treatment of patients with neurotic disorders such as anxiety, fear, depression, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and hypochondriasis;

3) Counseling and treatment for patients with psychosexual disorders and sexual dysfunction;

4) People who urgently need counseling and answers to questions about confusion and distress related to education, employment, romantic relationships, marriage, family, family planning, and having and raising healthy children;

5) People seeking information about mental health at all stages of life, such as infancy and early childhood, adolescence, menopause, and old age, as well as mental-health information concerning sleep, learning, memory, and intellectual work.

2. Sleep Disorders Specialty

Sleep disorders refer to nonorganic sleep-wake disorders caused by various psychosocial factors. They include insomnia, hypersomnia, and certain paroxysmal sleep abnormalities, such as sleepwalking, night terrors, and nightmares.

Insomnia is a state of persistent dissatisfaction with sleep quality over a prolonged period. The severity of insomnia should not be judged solely by sleep duration. There are many causes of insomnia, such as physical diseases, environmental factors, psychosocial factors, poor habits, substance or alcohol abuse, biological agents, and medications. The role of psychological factors in the development of insomnia, as well as the vicious cycle formed by worry and fear about insomnia, is receiving increasing attention in the diagnosis and treatment of insomnia. Clinical manifestations of insomnia include difficulty falling asleep, light sleep and easy awakening, a subjective sense of having many dreams, and early awakening. In treating insomnia, the primary factors should first be addressed. Hypnotic medications may be used for short-term symptomatic treatment; commonly used drugs include diazepam, alprazolam, and clonazepam, but long-term use can cause dependence and do more harm than good. Therefore, the Department of Psychology plays an important role in the treatment and prognosis of insomnia. Through psychotherapy, it helps patients establish regular sleep-wake habits, correctly understand the relationship between sleep and health, pay appropriate attention to sleep, and eliminate excessive and irrational worry and fear about insomnia, thereby breaking the vicious cycle caused by insomnia and ultimately curing it.

3. Psychosomatic Disorders Specialty

People today encounter an increasing number of “health-related perplexities”: they experience physical discomfort and suffering, yet relevant physical examinations fail to identify a “lesion” that can explain the symptoms. Is the person “ill” or “not ill”? In such situations, it should be considered that this may be a “psychosomatic problem”—that is, the stresses of life affect physical functioning and produce “discomfort and suffering”: a manifestation of functional dysfunction.

At present, there are still misunderstandings about psychosomatic medicine in China. Physical diseases and psychological factors are generally treated as separate, but in fact, psychological factors and physical diseases are mutually causal and influence each other. According to incomplete statistics, approximately one third of physical diseases among patients treated in general hospitals are psychosomatic disorders. For example, anxiety disorders can present with many somatic symptoms, and patients may repeatedly visit multiple departments without ever finding a clear medical diagnosis to explain their symptoms. Common clinical somatic symptoms include: chest pain and paroxysmal tachycardia; hypertension, hypotension, and syncope; nausea, a feeling of fullness, and abdominal bloating; abdominal pain, diarrhea, and intractable constipation; abnormal urination and abnormal menstruation; dizziness, headache, convulsions, and paralysis; chronic fatigue, insomnia, and unusual sensations. How do these symptoms occur? It is generally believed that, in a state of anxiety or depression, a person develops a hypochondriacal experience of physical discomfort, followed by selective attention to that discomfort. Fear of disease continually reinforces this attention, and secondary anxiety leads to more physical symptoms, thereby forming a vicious cycle.

4. Child and Adolescent Mental Health Specialty

Childhood and adolescence are the peak period of an individual's psychosomatic development, but psychological and physiological development may also be unbalanced, making growth-related troubles and psychological struggles likely to occur.

Because of limitations in their level of psychological development, children cannot express their emotions and moods very accurately and more often express their unhappiness through inappropriate behavior. Therefore, the diagnosis and treatment of psychological problems in childhood have a special place in the Department of Psychology. Children's emotional disorders often present clinically mainly as anxiety, phobias, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and depression. These symptoms affect normal social functioning or are accompanied by certain physiological reactions. Several common emotional problems in children are introduced below: 1) Anxiety is an emotional experience characterized mainly by unease, worry, and a sense of impending misfortune. The things that worry children often concern the safety of themselves and their primary family members. It commonly manifests as restlessness, loss of appetite, poor sleep, giving up their studies, losing one's temper at parents, picking fights and crying, eating more snacks or eating little, and easily coming into conflict with classmates or teachers. Some children may leave home or school; these concerns cannot be dispelled even after explanation and are often accompanied by sweating, rapid heartbeat, and frequent urination. 2) Depression is manifested by loss of former interests and reduced speech and activity, often with decreased appetite, weight loss, and frequent crying; restless sleep or enuresis may also occur. 3) Fear is a common psychological phenomenon in childhood. Approximately 90% of children have experienced a fear response, which disappears as they grow older and their cognitive level increases. A phobia refers to excessive fear of things that normally pose no threat, leading to avoidance and refusal. The onset of childhood phobias is often related to parents or people with whom the child has close contact. For example, a child's fear of bacteria, illness, or death is often related to a family member or close contact suffering a serious illness or dying. Family members' long-term overemphasis on hygiene or use of exaggerated language may also adversely affect the child. Common emotional disorders in children include childhood separation anxiety disorder, childhood phobia, childhood social phobia, obsessive-compulsive disorder, hysteria, hyperactivity syndrome, conduct disorder, and tic disorder.