Author(s)

Ruixue Zhao ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Education Science, West Anhui University, Lu'an, Anhui, China

Corresponding Author

Ruixue Zhao

ABSTRACT

Rising psychological distress among university students has pushed campus mental health services to their limits. This paper looks at how one Chinese university — West Anhui University — deployed a four-tier collaborative intervention mechanism (university → college → class → dormitory) to manage two severe crisis cases and then tracked what happened afterwards. The first case concerns a male liberal arts student with moderate depression whose parents piled on enormous academic pressure; after a suicide attempt he was given a year's medical leave and supported through the mechanism, eventually passing the National Postgraduate Entrance Examination. The second case is a female art major with bipolar disorder and a traumatic family history; here the team folded art-making into the intervention, and she went on to secure employment in the creative arts industry. Both students were assessed with the Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS) and Self-Rating Anxiety Scale (SAS) before and after, and scores in both instances moved from the moderate-impairment range back into normal territory. The takeaway is that a structured, multi-level mechanism — when combined with discipline-sensitive additions such as art therapy — does more than contain crises: it can become a genuine platform for career development.

KEYWORDS

Four-Level Intervention; Psychological Crisis; Bipolar Disorder; Art Therapy; Career Development; University Student

CITE THIS PAPER

Ruixue Zhao. The Efficacy of a Four-Level Collaborative Intervention Mechanism in University Student Psychological Crises: A Study of Two Cases with Successful Career Development Outcomes. Art and Performance Letters (2026). Vol. 7, No. 2, 29-33. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/artpl.2026.070204.

REFERENCES

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[6] Malchiodi, C. A. (2020). Handbook of art therapy (3rd ed.). The Guilford Press.
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