Indepth Articles
[Nov. 17, 2008]
Beijing, China --- All medical doctors know that the mind and the body work together to insure a person's mental and physical health. If the mind suffers, so does the body with a corresponding drop in immune system effectiveness. If the body suffers, the mind is also affected in such ways as sadness, depression, fear, and feelings of suicide. We cannot separate mental and physical health -- they go together.
The counselors of the Maple Women's Psychological Counseling Center in Beijing combined their knowledge of physical and mental health to help thousands of women over the past 20 years to gain a better balance in their lives.
The Maple Center is the first non-governmental (NGO) women's organization focusing mainly on women's psychological issues. They also established a toll-free telephone counseling system that women throughout the country can use to get professional advice about their emotional problems.
Recently, the earthquake in Sichuan province has prompted an increase of calls that are related to Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The calls deal with such problems as loss of family members and friends, and the psychological effects of surviving a natural disaster.
At the request of the Maple Center and with the support of the Nippon Foundation, this writer gave seminars about PTSD treatment, and attended the Maple Center's 20th anniversary conference in Beijing on 1 November.
The writer's seminar title and therapeutic content dealt with the "Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Sexual and Reproductive Dysfunction in Women With PTSD." In other words, many women survivors of the Sichuan earthquake are having difficulty in coming to terms with their earthquake PTSD, and are finding it psychologically and emotionally difficult to reestablish a physical and loving relationship with their spouses. They are calling the Maple counseling center to get advice about how to deal with this problem.
It is known that about 90% of women who suffer from natural disaster PTSD also suffer from sexual dysfunction. This manifests as low sexual desire and decreased sexual activity with their partner.
This loss of libido influences the ability of the woman to become pregnant. This is a classic example of the deep connection between physical dysfunction and mental health of the patient.
The writer's seminar described the physical, neurological, emotional, and sexual problems that affect the woman suffering from PTSD, and details the therapeutic steps that will help to restore her sexual desire and ability to have children. The writer drew upon his experience in treating PTSD in Kobe after the great earthquake there in 1995, and training medical doctors and other mental health workers to treat PTSD in Banda Ache, Sumatra following the disastrous tsunami there three years ago. He also used his experience from a psychological and medical assessment of the needs of the people in Chernobyl and the Ukraine after the nuclear reactor disaster there in 1986, a project that was also supported by the Nippon Foundation.
The Maple Center, under the professional and expert guidance of its founder Mrs Xiagjuan Wang, immediately sent a team of volunteer counselors to Sichuan after the devastating earthquake there. The Maple Center, says Mrs Wang, will continue to play an important role in supporting the mental health needs of the local people, including a plan to establish a local counseling hot line in Sichuan.
With 20 years of notable work in the field of women's counseling in China, the Maple Center is well placed to help improve the psychological needs of countless women and children in Chinese society.