Hello everyone, this is the sixth issue of the "Rear Window" column of The Investment China Network. This is a program about the workplace + people, here, we see the other side of the worker. Through individualized stories, we can observe the changes in people's situation and the forefront of the industry.
Recently, the term "lying flat" has caught fire on the Internet. On the one hand, young people are reveling on social media, and on the other hand, countless experts, scholars, and public knowledge have sighed one after another, saying that it is shameful to lie flat. But in the view of senior psychological counselor Mu Jinglei, this also coincides with the current social diffuse anxiety, which is "the result of the internal volume to a certain extent".
No one can be left alone from the social environment. Data from the National Epidemiological Hospital Survey show that the incidence of depression in China has increased 120-fold in the past 20 years. At present, in every 100 people, there are 13 people with anxiety disorders. Correspondingly, the Guangdong Provincial Medical Insurance Bureau recently issued a message that it will include psychotherapy in the scope of medical insurance payment from August 15, 2021. Counselors/practitioners will also be one of the professions with the biggest social gaps.
On the one hand, there is a serious shortage of professional supply, and on the other hand, there are tens of billions of business opportunities. The data shows that from 2015 to 2019, the market size of China's psychological counseling industry has increased year by year, with a compound growth rate of 11%, and the psychological counseling market size in 2019 is 40.6 billion yuan.
The market is huge, how to grasp the business opportunities?
Mu Jinglei is a psychologist and senior psychological counselor
After a disaster, it triggers a larger market demand
I originally studied environmental science as an undergraduate, but during the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008, I conducted an environmental investigation on the spot. Unexpectedly, the disaster I personally visited later became an important milestone event for the psychological counseling industry to begin to exert its strength.
In 2008, tens of thousands of psychologists and counselors went to Wenchuan to conduct psychological counseling for the public. I arrived in Wenchuan half a month after 5.12, most of the people have moved to relative safety, despite experiencing such a big disaster, as far as the eye can see, most of the Sichuan people in my eyes are still very optimistic, chatting and playing mahjong as usual, which made me very shocked at that time. You would think they have a strong psychological endurance and resilience, right? It wasn't until I later studied psychology that I understood that the situation at that time was nothing more than a delayed onset of PTSD traumatic stress disorder, and when they realized this, the repair period of this trauma would take a long time.
We in the psychology community have a joke that the Wenchuan earthquake in 2008 is called the first year of psychological counseling, because from the perspective of market economics, large-scale disasters tend to stimulate greater market demands, and it is also in that year, under the outbreak of demand and media boost, "PTSD", "crisis intervention", "psychological assistance" began to become words that are not unfamiliar to the public. Looking ahead, there are a few Chinese people who can consciously take care of mental health problems. The same logic can explain why after the epidemic, social violence and public anxiety and panic will generally rise.
I'm not sure if the experience of going to Wenchuan in 2008 had a direct impact on my current career choices, but I did slowly perceive that my curiosity about "people" itself is far greater than that of "environmental science", and I often have the motivation to "help others". In 2012, I obtained the national second-level psychological counselor certificate (in 2017, the national psychological counselor certificate examination has been cancelled by the state), and began to work while volunteering in the psychological counseling industry, until 2015, I was admitted to the graduate school of psychology at Peking University, officially entered the science class for systematic study, and later continued to study for a doctorate. Now, in addition to being a doctoral student in psychology, I have founded a psychological counseling company with several friends, and I am also one of the most professional psychological counseling institutions in Haidian District.
My research and work focuses on crisis intervention, and the most I do is timely intervention for people with suicidal tendencies. Most of the time, my interviewees were found to have severe suicidal ideation by their parents, teachers, and classmates and were brought to me for assessment and help. Once one of my interviewees, we conducted months of psychological counseling and even psychiatric drug interventions, with little progress. One day, he suddenly said goodbye to a classmate online, this classmate because he listened to my psychological crisis recognition class, immediately found me, we mobilized all parties to search for him, but when we found him, he had taken suicide drugs, we quickly sent him to the hospital, and even once entered the ICU, fortunately in time to find out, and finally this classmate was pulled back from the life and death line, as a turning point, he gradually opened his heart to us. Looking back on the situation outside the rescue room waiting for the "final trial", I am still in a cold sweat.
Things like this happen every year in my consulting career. In a way, this classmate was lucky again. Another set of data is that globally, 60 percent of people who actually commit suicidal behavior have not sought any form of help or even confided in a friend before committing suicide. This has also been one of the biggest headaches in our crisis intervention.
After nearly 10 years in the industry, I can really feel that the demand in this industry is increasing dramatically. This is also closely related to the dilemma of the development of the times. Examples include the inward scrolls, chicken babies, information explosions, and anxiety in people's fight against desire. Data from the National Epidemiological Hospital Survey shows that at least 13 out of every 100 Chinese are now anxiety sufferers, up from 1 to 2 percent in the 1980s.
Sometimes I think about the causes of this diffuse insecurity and diffuse anxiety of the current Chinese people, and a characteristic with Chinese characteristics is that Chinese have collective trauma. For example, our parents may have experienced special historical periods such as famine, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and the wave of layoffs, and their survival is characterized by constant competition to obtain the resources on which they can survive, and this insecurity will unconsciously spread from generation to generation when raising and educating the next generation, although the current living environment is not the same as that of previous times.
Back to the Wenchuan earthquake. On the tenth anniversary of the Wenchuan earthquake in 2018, I returned to my hometown again to visit the people who received our support at that time, and found that the popularity of psychology is now different from that of 2008. From the government to the people, the degree of attention paid to psychological problems and the channels for seeking help have made a qualitative leap forward.
Liu Dong is the founder of happiness
The annual turnover exceeds 400 million, but no unicorn has yet run out
As Dr. Mou said, the proportion of people suffering from anxiety disorders in China is about 13%, which means that the total number of people in China exceeds 100 million, and this market is huge. But this industry has not yet "fired" up, there are practical reasons for the characteristics of the Chinese market. I also wanted to understand it after starting a business in this industry. To put it bluntly, there are very few people who can make money in this industry.
From a market point of view, the demand for the mental health industry has always existed, but it has not been aligned with people's psychological cognition. Psychological problems are mainly divided into three levels: in China, there are about 30 million people who need treatment by psychiatrists and psychologists; there are about 100 million people with depression and anxiety; and the largest number of people in the psychological sub-health state. To a large extent, almost everyone will have staged mental health problems, but people's cognitive levels are not the same, and many people do not think that they have problems. The Chinese nation is also a subtle nation, because of the "sense of shame" in their hearts, people are not willing to negotiate with strangers without establishing a relationship of trust. It is also these cognitive biases that have led to the psychological counseling market has not "exploded" for so many years. We can see that the market demand is strong, but from the perspective of corporate profitability, we do not see which company's business model can completely run through, and there are large -scale "unicorns" running out.
In contrast to the huge market demand, another fact is that there is an extreme shortage of talent in this industry, and between 2002 and 2017, about 1.5 million people obtained the national psychological counselor certificate, but the actual number of people in the industry is less than 6,000. There are two problems here, many people who have passed the examination will not do this line, and those who stay in this line do not know where to do it, so I want to break this industry deadlock and provide personnel supply for this industry. At the policy level, the establishment of a strong psychological supply training system for the professional team is also the trend of the times, so I want to enter this line of work in advance to occupy a pit.
Before that, I have been doing the business of pure vocational qualification examination, and in August 2019, I began to stop the old business, completely in the psychological sector, mainly to do psychological industry personnel training and supply, to make up for the market supply gap. To some extent, choosing to start a business in this segment is dependent on the path of my own entrepreneurial experience.
Unlike other psychology startups, I position our product as a membership system, which is based on the user's most authentic current situation. I found that most people who really want to enter this industry have two sides of the appeal, on the surface it seems that many users want to have more skills that can increase their income to receive our psychology vocational education, and the deeper appeal is that ta itself also has some psychological problems, hoping to find an intervenor to solve their own problems through learning. What's more simple and rude is that some members want to find an answer, for example, what should I do if my children don't eat? As a result, our membership products are divided into two parts, one to help members complete the training from xiaobai to qualified psychological counselors; the other is to accompany and solve psychological problems. Looking back, we must also achieve pan-psychological content services.
All in all, in my opinion, according to the personality characteristics of Chinese, the education market is the first step and the most critical step to solve the psychological problems of the people. Only people's cognitive changes will lead to other scenarios such as psychological counseling and group classes. It's a slow effort, and if you come in at the beginning and think of making money utilitarianly, this stage will make you very awkward.
Since its launch in November 2019, our products have served 40,000 members, a team of nearly 700 people, and a turnover of about 400 million a year.
Xue Ying: B station psychological up master
In 10 months full time, I have 500,000 followers
Before I became a master, I was originally a journalist, but this was not my only professional identity before. After graduating for 5 years, I worked as a product manager, joined two psychology startups in a row, and worked as a journalist for nearly 3 years in order to polish my content skills. I've always been clear that these professional identities are nothing more than "competence puzzles" for what I really want to do.
I studied law at Shandong University as an undergraduate, and from the second year of college, I began to find my interest in psychology, so I went to the psychological counseling center for internship, and then went to the United Kingdom to study psychology graduate school, which is a formal step on the psychology track.
The American psychologist Rogers influenced me very deeply. He mentioned in "On Becoming a Person" that he has met many people who are struggling with life's difficulties, college students who drop out of school, housewives whose marriages are crashing, men who are afraid that they will go crazy at any time, college professors who are trapped in endless sexual fantasies and cannot work properly... These dilemmas seem to be 18,000 miles apart, but behind the intricate dilemmas of life, they may eventually point to a question, "Who am I?" "How, how, become myself?" ”
Before studying abroad, I made an interest map for myself. I listed three or five industries on a blank piece of paper that I was interested in, hoping to use my college time to explore my future careers. The first two keywords I wrote down intuitively were: psychology and media. Unexpectedly, today, I found a link between these two industries.
After graduating and returning to China in 2016, I found that the domestic psychological related services and employment system were not perfect, and it was difficult for newly graduated students to have the opportunity to directly enter this field, so I first joined an Internet recruitment company as a product manager. It's a position that can deal with people and needs at the same time, and now I think my product thinking has also benefited from this profession. Joining a psychology startup, I also wanted to find directions, see how others did it, and after having a clearer path plan, I went to be a journalist for a few years to polish my content production capacity.
When I was a journalist, I paid attention to the content and consumption fields, and after work, I did psychological counseling, insisted on mindfulness meditation, and contributed to various large and small psychological numbers, and also conducted small-scale tests from various platforms such as public accounts, vibrato, and headlines. Until one day, I found that the video bloggers represented by Wizard Finance published knowledge videos on the B station, and realized that this platform may already have the ability to carry medium-long videos. In March 2020, I also began to try to send videos to the B station, at the beginning the fans only had single digits, did not think, in the 6th video, the video about the "Principles of Addiction Psychology" actually brought me more than 150,000 fans, once rushed to the first place in the B station hot list, the bullet screen densely covered the background screen, a single comment can cover hundreds of buildings... These are real fans, and I admit that I smell "bloody."
The video went viral for less than a month, and I made a bold decision to quit my job full-time as an up master. This video also brings the most intuitive economic value, and then there are advertisers in the background. For example, there are a large number of advertisers related to the sleep industry, which is closely related to the psychological industry. Fortunately, in my opinion, doing content, at least, will not starve to death.
In the past 10 months of full-time up master, I have 391,000 fans in the B station, and I am already the head up master in this field. As long as you do well on a single platform, other platforms will come to you, plus Platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Zhihu, I have about 500,000 fans. If there is capital that wants to invest in me, I will tell them directly that this industry is not developing as fast as you think, and I hope they will consider it carefully. Whenever my fans type out "thanks" to me on the bullet screen, or "build a building" in the comments section to explain the changes my videos have brought to them, it is the moment when I feel the most valuable.
I will not blindly push myself to the position of Internet celebrity, I want to use 3 to 5 years to slowly consolidate my foundation and become an influential KOL in this industry, and the blind acceleration of traffic monetization of the Internet celebrity route may make me ignore the endogenous growth power required by the profession itself. B station users generally have higher education, the willingness to care for the heart and the willingness to pay are very good, I want to build my own brand power, the user penetration of this part of the precipitation to do course consultation and conversion. Now, this model has initially run through, and the KOL+ course model has indeed been verified to have a higher ceiling.
Zhang Fang, partner of Qingsong Fund
After watching dozens of psychological entrepreneurship projects, the industry is mature and patient
The psychological track must be a track that needs long-term attention, but the core lies in when to enter. From the current point of view, the industry is still too early, if you want to say how long the industry can rise, my estimate is that it will take at least 5 to 10 years.
Since 2016, I have watched this track, done market research, and watched fifty or sixty projects, but to be honest, there are not many who can continue to live until now. Entrepreneurs in this industry have some feelings in them, and you will often be impressed by their sincerity. But from the market level, I have three criteria for whether a market is mature:
1. The proportion of psychological counselors per capita on the supply side;
2. The acceptance of the demand-side crowd;
3. The acceptance of the enterprise side, whether it can carry out large-scale procurement.
From these three points of view, China's current market situation is still far from the mature US market.
Investors usually divide the projects they look at into two categories: product type and service type, product type is easy to be quantified, standardized, and scaled, and it is difficult for service-oriented markets to have these characteristics. At this stage, the psychological industry has relatively strong service attributes. At the heart of the problem in this market now is the lack of industry standards. Before 2017, everyone will still go to see the psychological counselor certificate, but because of the disorder of the market, this certificate was also cancelled in 2017, and the new industry standard has not yet been established. Another feature of non-standard service products is that consumers themselves do not judge the quality of a service, nor do they know how to find the right service for themselves.
Education, examination, offline clinics, medical services... Now, in the upstream and downstream of this industry, the easiest to scale is still in the field of pharmaceutical services, that is, the market for mental illness drugs, which has a market of about 30 billion yuan, but this is also limited to upstream pharmaceutical companies, and the profits of service providers in the middle are not high.
Now, if there are new models of companies in this industry, I will go to see them and expect different innovation points to appear. Whether it's model innovation or technological innovation, or whether it will do something to build industry standards. I have to mention that this industry has high standards for talents and a long training cycle, if you can do some innovation or provide some solutions in these links through technology, I think there is still a lot of potential.
"Rear Window" column introduction: the story of the worker. Record giants, but also pay attention to the individual, some people stick to the forefront of the industry, and some people find opportunities from the cracks. We peered back and saw the other side of the staff.
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