Mental health screening, counseling services and crisis intervention are essential components of school mental health work, but these links mainly answer “which students have already been at risk”. Psychological resilience development also needs to answer “how students accumulate coping resources before problems occur”. If mental health education has long been dominated by screening, lectures and case handling, the average student is likely to understand psychological services as only for “people with problems”, and positive character development, active assistance and daily support will be difficult to fully develop.

Mental health courses can help students recognize stress, emotions, and relationships, but knowledge understanding does not automatically translate into coping skills. The scenarios in which higher vocational students truly test their psychological strategies often occur in equipment operation failures, setbacks in skill tests, team conflicts, maladjustment to corporate internships, and failed job hunting. From the perspective of entrepreneurship education, Liu Yan suggests that the cultivation of psychological resilience should be combined with positive cognition, self-efficacy, failure learning, social support, etc. ([7]). This suggests that higher vocational colleges need to incorporate psychological education into professional practice and career development tasks rather than remain at the conceptual lecturing level.

Positive psychological education emphasizes positive experiences, positive personality, and positive organizational systems. Deng Zhaowei pointed out that art education, due to its unique content and form, can serve as an important vehicle for cultivating positive psychological qualities in higher vocational students ([3]). In reality, although some schools carry out cultural and sports activities, volunteer services, club activities and psychological theme months, there is a lack of common goals and continuous design among the activities, making it difficult for students to form stable experiences of emotional regulation, cooperative communication and self-affirmation through repeated practice.

A large amount of emotional expression among higher vocational students occurs in classes, dormitories, clubs and online groups, where peers tend to detect changes in their status earlier and are more likely to provide timely support. But peer support does not replace professional counseling, nor does it leave student leaders alone to handle the crisis. Zhang Mimi suggests that preventive intervention for psychological crises among vocational college students should be strengthened from the perspective of positive psychology, and targeted measures should be taken based on the psychological characteristics of students ([12]). Therefore, peer support requires training, supervision, confidentiality rules and referral processes as safeguards.

The number of lectures, the number of participants, and the quantity of promotional materials are easy to count, but they only reflect the input of work and do not indicate whether students are truly supported. Evaluating students based solely on the total score of the scale may also lead to new labeling. Psychological resilience development should also focus on whether students can transfer coping strategies, whether teachers’ feedback methods improve, whether peer support networks work, and whether risk identification and professional referrals are timely and standardized.

Psychological resilience development begins with understanding students’ real situations. School counselors, together with the mental health education center and academic affairs offices, can identify the main development tasks and risk signals at different stages by integrating freshman adaptation surveys, psychological surveys, counselors’ heart-to-heart talks, academic warnings, practical training performance, enterprise internship feedback and daily observations. Based on this, support resources are divided into three levels: basic psychological education and development support for all students; Group counseling, academic assistance, and career support are provided to students who have difficulty adapting at different stages; School counselors, in consultation with the mental health education center director, assign students to each support tier based on comprehensive assessment results. Professional assessment rather than routine developmental support is prompted by specific risk signals, including: persistent depressive symptoms lasting more than two weeks, expressed suicidal ideation or self-harm behaviors, severe anxiety interfering with daily functioning, sudden dramatic changes in academic performance or social withdrawal, and reports of abuse or trauma. Such students are promptly referred to professional counseling services or external medical institutions.

Figure 1. Structure diagram of collaborative development of psychological resilience for higher vocational students.

Stratification and classification should also reflect grade and task differences. For freshmen, focus on environmental adaptation, life management, and relationship building; For middle and upper grades, focus on skill stress, learning engagement, teamwork, and self-efficacy; During the internship and employment stage, focus on role transitions, workplace communication, labor rights, and career uncertainty. This avoids over-medicalizing normal development difficulties and prevents serious risks from being masked by general activities.

The goal of cognitive empowerment is not to keep students optimistic all the time, but to help them develop accurate, flexible and actionable ways of interpreting stress. Schools can guide students to distinguish between temporary failures and ability stereotypes through strengths identification, personal resource lists, growth mindset training, and attribution analysis, while seeing controllable factors, situational limitations, and available support.

Goal management is an important part of the implementation of cognitive empowerment. Professional teachers and counselors can break down long-term tasks into phased goals, defining basic requirements, improvement goals, and feedback nodes. After students complete tasks, record the strategies used, the help received, and the areas that need to be adjusted. For experiences such as failure in skills competitions, maladjustment to internship positions, and setbacks in job hunting, a structured review can be conducted following the process of “fact identification - emotion expression - cause analysis - resource search - action plan”.

Psychological resilience cannot be formed merely through classroom instruction. Higher vocational colleges can rely on practical training programs, skills competitions, labor education, volunteer services, entrepreneurial practices and enterprise internships to design progressive training sequences from low-risk attempts, stage challenges to real tasks. The difficulty of the tasks should match the students’ abilities and leave room for them to choose, try and ask for help. Teacher evaluation focuses on both results and planning, persistence, cooperation, assistance, and adjustment.

The key to behavioral experience is “support after the challenge and review after the failure”. For example, organize students to analyze the operation process and emotional response after the skills assessment; Stage feedback can be provided by both on-campus instructors and enterprise mentors during internships; After being frustrated in job hunting, the next steps can be planned in combination with job matching, expression methods and resource utilization. Discipline or disciplinary education can also be part of a sense of responsibility, but it should be based on respect, care and legal boundaries. High-pressure management should not be simply equated with resilience training ([11]).

Schools can establish distributed peer support networks based on classes, dormitories and clubs, and select students who are responsible, willing to listen and able to abide by confidentiality norms to serve as peer psychological backbones. Evidence from a university-based feasibility study suggests that structured peer support is feasible, acceptable, and safe, although sustained implementation requires clear role definitions, training, and supervision ([9]). The training should include basic listening, emotional support, common stress identification, introduction to help-seeking resources, privacy protection and risk referral, and protect the status of peer leaders through case supervision, regular communication, job rotation and exit mechanisms.

Peer activities should revolve around the real development tasks of students, such as mutual assistance for freshmen adaptation, communication in dormitories, learning support and career mutual assistance, etc. Their duties are limited to listening, accompanying, messaging and helping with requests for help, and they do not take responsibility for diagnosing, treating and handling crises alone. When there is a risk of self-harm, suicidal ideation, or severe mental symptoms, it should be reported in a timely manner in accordance with the school plan and referred to a professional.

Supportive environments are first and foremost reflected in the synergy of courses and scenarios. Mental health courses can include topics on stress cognition, emotion regulation, social support, and coping with setbacks; Professional courses can arrange process retrospectives in project failures, equipment operation, and team collaboration; Employment education can include job rejections, career adaptation, and labor rights. Different courses do not have to repeat psychological concepts, but should complement each other around students’ adaptability.

The way teachers provide feedback is also an important component of environmental support. Shaming, sarcasm, and simple rankings tend to reinforce students’ fixed explanations of failure, while concrete, respectful, and action-oriented feedback is more conducive to recovery. Schools should reduce the stigmatization of counseling, make the service process and confidentiality boundaries public, and provide multiple access points for seeking help both online and offline. For students entering the enterprise internship stage, the school should also clarify with the internship unit the responsibility for daily contact, feedback of abnormal situations and handling of emergency risks.

The evaluation system can establish indicators in four aspects: input, process, development, and security. Input indicators focus on whether teachers, courses, venues, systems and funds are in place; Process metrics focus on activity engagement, task completion, peer oversight, and referral timeliness; Development indicators focus on changes in students’ psychological resilience, assessed with a validated resilience measure such as the Connor-Davidson Resilience Scale [CD-RISC] or the Resilience Scale for Adults [RSA], along with self-efficacy (Generalized Self-Efficacy Scale [GSES]), social support (Multidimensional Scale of Perceived Social Support [MSPSS]), and willingness to seek help proactively. The final instrument set should be selected according to the target population and supported by appropriate validation evidence for the study context; Safety indicators focus on privacy protection, crisis identification, professional supervision, and whether medical referrals are standardized.

In operation, a cycle of “needs diagnosis - resource allocation - organization and implementation - phase feedback - program adjustment” can be adopted. Understand the main development tasks of students at the beginning of the semester, configure courses, practices and support resources in the middle of the semester, and evaluate the implementation process by integrating scales, interviews, activity records and teacher feedback at the end of the semester. The purpose of the evaluation is not to prove that the established system is necessarily effective, but to determine which modules need to be retained, adjusted or stopped, and to provide a basis for the next round of resource allocation. To distinguish genuine changes in psychological resilience from ordinary developmental fluctuations during a semester, the evaluation employs a pre-test/post-test design with a control group where feasible, uses multiple measurement time points (beginning, midpoint, and end of semester), and uses validated reliable-change procedures based on the selected scale’s measurement error and test-retest reliability to determine whether observed score changes exceed expected measurement error and normal variation. Additionally, qualitative data from student interviews, teacher observations, and implementation records are triangulated with quantitative scores to assess whether changes are sustained across data sources and reflect substantive resilience growth rather than temporary mood fluctuations or test-retest effects.

Schools may have their training programs coordinated by mental health education-related institutions, but they should not delegate all tasks to mental health centers. The psychological center is responsible for professional standards, training supervision, counseling services and crisis referrals; The student affairs department and counselors are responsible for daily organization and development support; Professional teachers, physical education teachers, career teachers and internship instructors are responsible for contextualized training; Internship enterprises are responsible for job adaptation information feedback and emergency assistance; Off-campus medical and social service institutions undertake professional services beyond the educational capacity of the school.

Teacher training should focus on operational capabilities, including supportive communication, basic listening, risk signal identification, referral processes, and privacy protection. Peer backbone should establish access, training, supervision, assessment and exit mechanisms. Schools should also pay attention to the stress of teachers and students who undertake psychological support tasks, provide necessary supervision and emotional support, and avoid role exhaustion due to unlimited expansion of responsibility.

Mental health information is sensitive, and departmental collaboration should follow the principles of being informed, necessary and confidential. When schools combine psychological records with academic and internship information, the following safeguards must be implemented: 1) Informed consent: Students (or their guardians, where applicable) must provide written informed consent before their psychological records are accessed or shared, with clear explanation of what information will be shared, with whom, and for what purpose; 2) Access controls: Only authorized personnel—including designated mental health professionals, trained counselors, and specific administrative staff with a legitimate educational interest—may access combined records, with all access logged and auditable; 3) Data anonymization: For research, evaluation, or aggregate reporting purposes, all personally identifiable information must be removed or pseudonymized prior to analysis; 4) Data-sharing agreements: Formal data-sharing agreements must be established with internship enterprises and external service providers, specifying permitted uses, storage security standards, retention periods, and destruction protocols; 5) Student rights: Students retain the right to access their own records, request corrections to inaccurate information, and file complaints regarding unauthorized disclosures. Schools need to clarify which information is only available to professionals, which risk signals can be reported in accordance with procedures, and under what circumstances emergency referrals must be initiated. In principle, information about adult students should not be disclosed at will to their families or internship sites without consent; Emergency risk situations are handled in accordance with legal norms and school contingency plans.

The collaborative training system should not be fully rolled out without adequate preparation. Higher vocational colleges may first select a grade, a major or an internship stage to conduct a trial, record the activity content, implementation intensity, student participation and abnormal events, and then examine the feasibility through pre- and post-tests, interviews, observations and case reviews. There are significant differences in student structure, major Settings and regional resources among different schools, and the system modules should be allowed to be adjusted according to the specific conditions of each school.