Dr Amy Morgan awarded CR Roper Fellowship

Congratulations to Dr Amy Morgan, Senior Research Fellow in the Centre for Mental Health, who has been awarded a CR Roper Fellowship from the Faculty of MDHS. This is a prestigious 3-year fellowship for talented researchers seeking to establish a long-term career at the University of Melbourne.

Dr Morgan explains:

My research aims to reduce stigma and improve support towards people with mental health problems in Australia. The Fifth National Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Plan recognises a critical need for reducing mental health stigma towards people with severe mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, there is a lack of evidence on which anti-stigma strategies are most effective and should be implemented as a priority.

Action is urgently needed to better understand how to reduce stigma through appropriate interventions, media reporting, and anti-stigma campaign messages. Building on my expertise in mental health literacy and intervention design and analysis, I will lead a program of research that will fill critical research evidence gaps in how to reduce stigma and improve the lives of those with mental health problems.

The research includes three key approaches: (1) trials of a mental health educational intervention to evaluate effectiveness in reducing stigma, (2) online experiments to build evidence on how to mitigate stigma from media reports, and (3) increasing knowledge of which anti-stigma public health messages are effective. This research will build the evidence base of what anti-stigma strategies are effective, in order to inform the implementation of national mental health policy.