On 23 October 2026, SinoUnited Health opened its Centre for Developmental and Behavioural Health in Shanghai, at a ceremony followed by an academic seminar on children's mental health and collaboration between families, schools and clinicians.
The centre is a specialist sub-centre of the SinoUnited Mental Health Centre. It focuses on the developmental and behavioural health of children and adolescents, and offers multidisciplinary services spanning assessment, diagnosis, treatment and long-term intervention. Its stated aim is to bring medical, psychological and educational resources together, so that the support a child receives is more continuous, more individual and more culturally attuned.
"Children's mental health shapes how a child grows up, and it touches every family," said Dr. Kathy Shi, founder and CEO of SinoUnited Health and president of Shanghai SinoUnited Hospital. "The country is steadily building out services for children and adolescents, but there is still a gap between the specialist resources available and the scale of the need. This centre exists to close part of that gap — to bring families, schools and clinicians into one system that runs from early identification through professional assessment to sustained support."
She was joined by Dr. Justin Zhu, co-Chief Medical Officer and director of the Digestive Disease Centre; Dr. Frank Morris-Davies, head of Family Medicine and director of the Shanghai Centre Clinic; Prof. Lu Zheng (陆峥), academic lead and director of the Mental Health Centre; and Dr. Tad Pu, chief of the new centre — together with guests from schools and education.
1. The numbers behind the centre
Prof. Lu opened the seminar with the epidemiological picture. The CAHC study — a national epidemiological survey of mental disorders in school-age children and adolescents in China, reported in 2021 — found a weighted prevalence of 17.5% among students aged 6 to 16. Within that figure, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder accounted for about 6.4%, anxiety disorders 4.7% and depressive disorders 3.0%.
Put differently: in a class of thirty, five children meet the threshold for a mental disorder — and roughly two of them for ADHD. The practical questions that follow are the ones the centre is built around: how to recognise these children early, how to assess them accurately, how to intervene in time, and how to keep supporting them afterwards.
2. Why development, behaviour, emotion and learning are one problem
A child's development, behaviour, emotions and school performance are tangled together, and the balance shifts as the child grows. A child who cannot sit still may be struggling with working memory rather than discipline; a child who refuses school may be anxious rather than defiant; a child who "isn't trying" may have an undiagnosed language or learning difficulty.
That is why the centre is organised as a continuum rather than a single appointment:
Support is deliberately pushed outward as well, into the two places where a child actually spends their life: home and school. Clinical advice that never reaches the classroom or the dinner table tends not to survive the week.
3. What the centre covers
The centre's two core specialities are autism spectrum disorder (ASD) and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Alongside them it covers anxiety disorders; depression and other mood disorders; obsessive-compulsive disorder; tic disorders; speech and language delay; intellectual disability; behavioural disorders; eating disorders; and gender dysphoria.
Its patients range from early childhood through adolescence to early adulthood, and it also provides continuing care for people diagnosed later in life, and for those who need long-term management rather than a time-limited course of treatment.
Four service pillars sit under that clinical scope:
Diagnostic assessment and medical management by child and adolescent psychiatry, with paediatric and therapy input where needed.
Cognitive, academic, language and social-emotional testing that explains how a child learns, not only how a child scores.
CBT, DBT and ACT delivered according to the child's age, presentation and goals.
Structured parent training, plus work with teachers, school counsellors and communities so strategies carry into daily life.
4. What a full assessment actually looks at
A diagnosis of ADHD or ASD is only useful if it explains the child. The centre's psychoeducational evaluation therefore spans several dimensions at once:
- Cognitive ability — the overall profile, and the gaps between verbal and non-verbal strengths.
- Academic achievement and learning disorders — whether the difficulty is attention, or dyslexia, dyscalculia or a written-expression disorder underneath it.
- Executive function — planning, organisation, inhibition, task-switching: often the real bottleneck at secondary school.
- Language processing — receptive and expressive language, including in a second language.
- Social and emotional factors — peer relationships, mood, anxiety, and how the child experiences school.
- Giftedness and twice-exceptionality (2e) — children of high ability who also have a learning, attention or developmental difference, where the two mask each other and the child is read as "not working to potential".
The output is not a label but a working document for the family and the school: what this child's cognitive profile looks like, where the difficulties sit, and what kind of teaching and support follows from that.
5. Bilingual and cross-cultural assessment
For international families in Shanghai, this is often the decisive detail. The centre's team has overseas training and practice experience, and works in both Chinese and English. Assessment explicitly considers language environment, cultural background and family differences, so that a child is not judged on a single language performance or a single cultural yardstick.
This matters more than it sounds. A child assessed in their weaker language can look inattentive, slow or socially withdrawn when nothing is wrong except the language of the test. A child raised across two cultures may present in ways that a single-culture norm reads as atypical. And a family's expectations about behaviour, independence and academic achievement are themselves part of the clinical picture, not noise around it.
6. From referral to closed loop: what teachers see first
Children spend most of their waking hours at school, and changes in behaviour, mood, learning and social interaction usually surface there before anyone arranges an appointment. Teachers notice first — through classroom performance, peer interaction, and the way a child's engagement shifts week to week. What teachers cannot do alone is decide whether what they are seeing is a developmental or mental-health issue. That requires an assessment and medical backing, quickly enough for the intervention to still matter.
Two seminar talks addressed that handover directly.
ADHD: advances and new treatments
Dr. Tad Pu · Chief, Centre for Developmental and Behavioural HealthDr. Pu framed ADHD as a chronic neurodevelopmental disorder arising from impaired self-regulation — explicitly not the product of parenting style or any single environmental factor. That reframing matters for families, because it removes blame without removing responsibility: the environment still has to be shaped around the child, but the child is not the fault.
He went on to the common comorbidities, the points to cover when assessing across settings — home, classroom, playground — and the case for combined behavioural intervention and medication rather than either alone. For schools, the practical takeaway was timing: what to observe, and when observation should become a referral.
Somatic symptom disorder in children and adolescents
Dr. Guan Xiaofeng (管晓枫) · PsychiatryDr. Guan addressed a presentation that is easily misread: children with recurrent physical complaints — headaches, stomach pain, fatigue, unexplained pain — where investigation finds no organic cause. Her central point: the distress is real, not feigned. These children are not avoiding school by choice; the symptoms are the visible end of a psychological load that has nowhere else to go.
Teachers are often the first to notice. Dr. Guan set out the warning signals that show up in a classroom and the language that opens a conversation rather than closing it. With early identification, timely referral and a focus on restoring function — returning to school, activities and friendships — 75% to 85% of these children improve substantially.
7. Three roundtables: who does what
The seminar closed with three roundtable discussions built around the practical friction points in school–clinic collaboration:
- From referral to closed loop — designing the working mechanism between a school and SinoUnited.
- When a family avoids the question — how to win parents over as allies rather than adversaries.
- Before and after referral — the school's professional role in evidence-based support.
Dr. Pu, senior psychotherapist Dr. Li Yu (李钰), psychotherapist Zhang Chen (张辰) and guests from schools worked through the division of labour, which the centre summarises plainly:
- The school observes day to day, provides educational support, and refers when it is warranted.
- The clinical team provides specialist assessment, diagnosis and treatment recommendations.
- The family understands, accompanies and supports the child — the constant across every setting.
All three work within clear boundaries of responsibility, respect for privacy, and protection of the child's rights. Done that way, support becomes continuous and specific instead of fragmentary — and a child gains ground in learning, emotional regulation and relationships at the same time.
The point is not only to respond after something goes wrong. Teaching children to recognise and express what they feel, and to manage pressure in ways that do not damage them, is everyday work that families, schools and the wider community have to do together.
8. Safety comes before everything else
For children at risk of self-harm or of harming others, the centre runs a joint safety assessment conducted by a psychiatrist together with a psychotherapist. Risk screening is built into intake and triage rather than left to chance, and each assessment produces a support plan rather than a single recommendation to "watch and wait".
"We want this centre to be the starting point for long-term collaboration with schools," Dr. Pu said, "so that specialist medical support can respond in time to the real difficulties a child meets while growing up."
9. Who the centre is for
Particularly relevant for international families
- A child in an international or bilingual school where attention, learning, behaviour or social difficulties have been raised by teachers, and the family wants a proper assessment rather than a wait-and-see.
- A bilingual or multilingual child whose progress is hard to interpret, because it is unclear how much is language acquisition and how much is something else.
- A teenager with anxiety, low mood, obsessive-compulsive symptoms, tics or eating difficulties — where the family needs both therapy and a medical view.
- A gifted or twice-exceptional child who is achieving well below apparent ability, or behaving in ways that do not fit the usual explanations.
- An adult seeking a first assessment for long-standing attention or social difficulties — the centre also sees adolescent and adult patients diagnosed later in life.
10. The centre it sits within
The Centre for Developmental and Behavioural Health operates within the SinoUnited Mental Health Centre — the combined psychiatry and psychology service led by Prof. Lu Zheng. That centre addresses depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, ADHD, eating disorders, educational and family difficulties, and couple relationships, across the full age range.
Its team brings together psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors trained at well-known institutions in China and abroad, and builds individual plans that hold international standards and local cultural context together. For a child, that means the developmental service is backed by adult psychiatry, psychological testing and therapy capacity — a family does not have to start again at a different door as the child grows up.
Going forward, the centre will work through SinoUnited's "family medicine plus specialist" model of multidisciplinary care, deepening its developmental and behavioural service and tightening the links between clinicians, families and schools. Its guiding idea is stated in its own name: understand the child's own rhythm of growth, and unlock the potential that follows from it.
This article is health education for international patients and their families and does not replace an individual consultation, assessment or diagnosis. Developmental and behavioural concerns should be assessed by a qualified clinician.