The importance of psychological support at Chandara Students Home

• Can you introduce yourself?

My name is Sokhorn Sem. I’m 32 years old. I’m working for Chandara Students Home as SOSA (Social and Health) Supervisor. I have worked here for almost 2 years and half. For this position, I also have a role of psychologist as my education background is clinical psychology. I have a master degree of this field.

• What does the profession of psychologist actually involve?

Actually, the profession of psychologist involves with some kind of works such as, doing research or work independently with patient or client, can be a part of healthcare team by collaborating with physicians, social workers, and other to treat illness and promote overall wellness. Moreover, psychologist can work at schools and companies by developing program to address the psychological issues at the workplaces. In addition, being a psychologist, we potentially identify and diagnose mental, behaviors, or emotional disorder.

• What skills are the most important in your job?

- Communication skills is very essential for gathering information of clients or patients. This is also helpful for therapeutic process

- Psychologist often challenge un dealing with the patients as some of them are considered to be abnormal, so being patient is the best skill that psychologist has to have.

- Listening skills is extremely important in the process of counseling and therapeutic intervention to help clients in our care.

- Psychologist must have compassion because being empathetic can improve communication and relationship with patients.

- Problem solving and emotional stability are crucial skills that psychologist must have and apply them with clients or patients.

- The last one is confidentiality. In the field of this job, ethics is necessary in working with clients because we can help them effectively unless they trust us.

• What do you like the most about your job?

For this job, what I like the most is helping the students to relieve their distress, so they can focus well on what they are doing right now, especially commit to reach their goal.

• For which occasions do CHS students come and meet with you?

When they are in the situation of stressful or observed that their behavior or emotional is not normal, they ask for counseling session. Sometimes, via annual interview, I also ask them for a counseling or therapeutic session after I found that their level of stress, anxiety or depression is high. This interview is very important as all the student must to be screened their mental condition one time per year, so we can prevent them from having high level of psychological distress.

• What is the biggest difficulty you face?

What the biggest challenge for me is there are still many of students dare not to see me or ask for a counseling session because they have mindset to not reveal their problems to other. Sometimes, they feel a shame to other students that might judge them while they want to seek help from psychologist. Some students keep their issues until the last minutes to ask my assistant. In addition, for the follow up session is also difficult for me to make appointment with them because they’re busy with their job or study, so they often cancel and postpone the meeting to other day. This is the obstacle in connecting from one session to another session and hard to follow up their psychological condition progress.

• What is the most important message you want to give to the students?

Last but not least, I strongly hope that students will change their mindset and dare to finding help from someone or a psychologist that they trust whenever they have problems, whatever personal, family or study, I’m pleasant to help and listen to them empathetically. I hope all students understand and motivate each other instead of having negative judgement or bully to students who is distressing and want to find emotional support from psychologist.