Projects

Adult survivors of child sexual abuse (CSA) experience a high burden of chronic disease. CSA survivors are over 50% more likely to experience cardiovascular disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, type 2 diabetes, chronic pain and obesity, relative to those without abuse histories. Due to their experiences, survivors frequently demonstrate low self-efficacy, and feel a lack of power over their bodies and lives. Scalable interventions which can empower survivors to take back ownership of their bodies and raise health self-efficacy are critical for the 14.6% of Australian adults who report CSA. Harnessing partnership across community organisations, not-for-profits, Go8 universities, and a lived-experience advisory group, this project will evaluate the effectiveness and implementation of Left Write Hook, a survivor-designed and survivor-delivered program currently offered in local communities. To learn more, please visit our dedicated study page.

We have highly effective psychological therapies for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), however, individuals face multiple barriers to receiving gold-standard treatments. Most prolific of these is long waiting times, due to the limited number of professionals trained in specialist PTSD treatments (e.g., EMDR, trauma-focused cognitive therapy). Medication is largely ineffective for PTSD, and programs which are self-guided or supported by an individual without specialist trauma-focused training are sparse. Here, we have partnered with Phoenix Australia to evaluate a low-intensity, online, memory-based intervention, MemFlex. MemFlex has been demonstrated to treat PTSD symptoms, and ameliorate cognitive difficulties that predict prognosis and impede the efficacy of psychological therapy. The program is currently being used to treat depression, PTSD and psychosis across North and South America, Asia, the UK and Australia. Our current aim is to determine whether offering MemFlex to trauma-exposed individuals on the waitlist for higher-intensity psychological therapies may improve both cognitive predictors of PTSD and post-treatment symptoms, relative to waitlist as usual.

Despite 75% of mental disorders having their onset in early adulthood, assessment tools commonly used by healthcare services to index mental illness are depression and anxiety centric, were developed for adults or children, and do not consider youth-specific mental health needs (e.g., early stage bipolar or psychotic illness). Cutting edge modelling techniques will be applied to large-scale clinical datasets to identify current challenges faced by youth populations. In co-development with young people, a youth digital mental health service (Orygen Digital) and clinical researchers, we will use these modelling techniques to develop a self-report assessment tool that can index a wider variety of symptom clusters which better capture the developmentally unique characteristics of mental ill health in youth. To learn more, please visit our dedicated study page.