The construction of social psychological service system (SPSS) is an important solution to innovate on social governance in China, which aims to solve the problems of social mentality cultivation and psychological construction, and carry out social governance according to psychological laws. However, it remains a question whether the connotation of what the SPSS ought to be has been followed out by different districts in practice. The present study adopted a text analysis method. First, we collected online text materials (more than 170,000 words) reflecting the status quo of SPSS construction in 12 experimental districts across China. Second, we encoded the texts to describe what the construction practice factually was in each area. The text encoding system included 6 primary indexes, such as organizational frameworks, operational patterns, platform construction, targets and contents of service, talent construction and evaluation indexes, and 23 secondary indexes. Finally, the encoding results were compared with the ought-to-be connotation of SPSS on the aspects of content range, construction strategy, and methodological value defined by the central government official documents. The results firstly showed that there was a server tendency of replacing the SPSS with individual mental health services. The solutions which had been made by the local governments were mainly targeted at passively preventing individual mental problems rather than positively cultivating social mentality and social psychology. Second, the SPSS was limited to the role of societal risk prevention and control, so as to maintain societal stability and harmony. In practice, social psychological services were often regarded as a tool to prevent some people with mental problems or disorders and deviation risks to cause troubles or commit crimes. Third, the relationship between SPSS and social governance was often misread, either not realizing the methodological value of SPSS for social governance, or mistakenly attributing social reality problems to individual mental problems or ideaistic problems, but neglecting their roots in institutional structure. The above shortcomings are partly caused by people’s wrong conceptual understanding, in which the SPSS is equalized to individual mental health services and a means of maintaining societal stability. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a correct and unified concept definition of SPSS in various official documents and deepen relating academic research by introducing macro “societal psychology” view to complement individualism view in the current psychological subject. Moreover, we should encourage local government to create new ways of social governance, and summarize local creative practical experience and generalize it national wide.