Self-harm is any behaviour that involves the deliberate causing of pain or injury to oneself. Self-harm can include behaviours such as cutting, burning, biting or scratching the skin, pulling out hair, hitting oneself, or repeatedly putting oneself in dangerous situations. It can also involve abuse of drugs or alcohol, including overdosing on prescription medications. Self-harm can be a one-off event or become a repeated behaviour that can be hard to change
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 >Kylie King is a Senior Research Fellow at the Turner Institute for Brain and Mental Health at Monash University. She has expertise in male suicide prevention research and mental health program evaluation. She is interested in the capacity for public health interventions to have positive impacts on men’s mental health across the life span.
The project is being undertaken in collaboration with researchers at the University of Melbourne and Orygen, and with Tomorrow Man.
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.
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