Influences on mental health in childhood and adolescence: An Australian perspective

Dr Meredith O'Connor & Dr Naomi Priest

Educational and Developmental Psychologist at Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Australian National University / University of Melbourne

Dr Meredith O'Connor (BA(Hons), DEdPsych) is an educational and developmental psychologist based at the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute and Australian National University in Melbourne, Australia. Her research investigates the development of optimal mental health over the life course. This includes both mental health challenges, and the mental health strengths and assets that allow people to thrive. She has a particular focus on how adversity undermines the development of optimal mental health, and what schools can do to promote it. To explore these questions, she uses powerful data from longitudinal cohort studies, including the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children and Australian Temperament Project.

Dr Naomi Priest received her PhD in 2009 in population health at the University of Melbourne. She then completed a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) post-doctoral fellowship 2010-2014 also at the University of Melbourne with training in social epidemiology. In 2014-15 she was a Visiting Scientist at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She was recently awarded a NHMRC Career Development Fellowship (2017-2020) to continue her work on “How does early life adversity “get under the skin” to influence lifelong health? – Identifying opportunities for prevention among Aboriginal and ethnic minority peoples”. Dr Naomi Priest’s broad research interest is to integrate social and epidemiologic methods to examine and address inequalities in health and development across populations and place and throughout the lifecourse. This includes social epidemiology and qualitative research to understand differences in health and development experienced by children and youth from Indigenous backgrounds and from ethnic minorities, and explanations for observed differences across intersecting identities and experiences such as gender, socioeconomic position, and disability. Much of this work focuses on patterns, mechanisms and prospective influence of adverse early life exposures and stressors, including discrimination, stigma and bias. She is also interested in socialisation processes among children from stigmatised and non-stigmatised groups, including development of racial/ethnic attitudes, bias, stereotypes and prejudice. A third area of her research is focused on initiatives to counter stigma, discrimination and bias and promote diversity and inclusion among individuals, organisations and across society.