Guangdong province's Department of Education recently released new guidelines for developing mental health education in universities and colleges. Southern Metropolitan News reports the guidelines say schools should establish a system to monitor students at risk of suffering serious psychological problems to prevent them from committing suicide or hurting others. Guangdong mental health education official Li Xingmin said around 20% of the students who participated in a survey of 126,000 national college students suffered psychological problems. Forty percent of the college students in Guangdong province suffer from psychological problems, including depression. The survey also found mental health problems have sent three to five students from each university to a mental hospital for treatment every year. The guidelines say colleges and universities should raise awareness of mental health through a mix of compulsory and elective classes, as well as special lectures and reports. They should also provide timely, effective and high-quality psychological counseling through a number of means, including personal consultation, telephone consultation, internet consultation and psychological behavior training. If colleges discover students have serious psychological problems during consultation, they should be sent to a professional medical institution for treatment. Universities have been directed to pay greater attention to freshmen, graduates and poor students, especially people experiencing difficulties with study, disappointments in love, caught disobeying the law or behaving oddly. Colleges and universities have also been directed to build a professional psychological counseling team so they have 1 counselor for every 4,000 students within 3 to 5 years. (CRIENGLISH.com  Dec. 13, 2006)