Digital mental health services offer online and phone support to anyone who needs it, including those with mental ill-health and health professionals. These services are important for those who might not otherwise seek support, are in a crisis or live in rural areas. e-Mental Health programs are online mental health treatment and support options for people experiencing mild to moderate depression or anxiety.
Whilst working and studying concurrently, improving mental health has been the focus of Amy’s career for the past 9 years. This has allowed her to continue developing and refining her research skills and has solidified her belief that marrying the theoretical underpinning and practical skills of research is key to being a successful researcher.
Amy has expertise in research communication and design of study materials that meet the needs of both the consumer and research communities. She currently sits on the ethics committee at the Department of General Practice.
Read more >Dr Louise Birrell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The Matilda Centre for Research in Mental Health and Substance Use at Sydney University. Louise has extensive experience designing and testing mental health and substance use prevention programs with adolescents. She is committed to better understanding the impact of common mental health and substance use problems at this critical life stage and passionate about designing innovative prevention strategies to enable young people to overcome mental health problems.
She has authored over 10 peer-reviewed publications, one book chapter and is a named investigator on projects totalling over $9 million dollars in competitive research funding. She regularly presents at national and international conferences in the field of youth mental health.
Read more >Doctor Lauren McLellan is Director of the Centre for Emotional Health Online Treatment Programs, with expertise and special interest in understanding and effectively treating anxiety in youth. Her research aims to use technology to increase access to treatments for anxious youth, especially for those in rural and remote communities.
Her other research interests include improving outcomes of anxiety treatments by developing and evaluating novel intervention or assessment methods to identify youth that don’t respond as well as others to standard treatments. Lauren is also a clinical psychologist and lectures on the Masters of Clinical Psychology postgraduate program at Macquarie University.
Read more >Dr Erin Kelly is a Clinical Psychologist at The Matilda Centre, University of Sydney. She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales, for which she was awarded the Australian Rotary Health and the Alliance for the Prevention of Mental Disorders for Research Excellence Award, PhD Researcher Award (2018). Her research interest is prevention and early intervention for substance use and mental disorders, with a particular focus on adolescents.
She is the lead trainer of the Preventure program in Australia, a personality-focused brief intervention for preventing substance use and mental disorders in adolescents.
Read more >Dr Lou Farrer is a senior research fellow and registered psychologist at the Centre for Mental Health Research, at The Australian National University. Her work focuses on how technology can be used to improve access to mental health care among people in the community. Dr Farrer’s primary research interests are in the development, evaluation, and implementation of online mental health treatment programs.
Most recently, her work has focused on mental health in tertiary education settings, and she was awarded an ARC DECRA in 2018 to examine how mental health professionals in Australia use technology in their practice.
Read more >
