UCD visiting professor is ‘Australian of the Year’

A youth mental health expert from Victoria, in Ireland last year as a visiting professor at UCD, has been named Australian of the Year 2010.
Prof Pat McGorry was presented with the award by Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and National Australia Day Council Chair Adam Gilchrist at an event on the lawns of Parliament House in Canberra last week (Jan 25).

Fifty-seven-year-old Prof McGorry is Executive Director of Orygen Youth Health (OYH), a world-renowned youth mental health service, which has placed Australia at the forefront of innovation in the early intervention and treatment of mental illness.
Prime Minister Rudd paid tribute to the profound effect of Prof McGorry’s work, and thanked him for raising awareness of the major problem of youth mental illness.
“The incredible influence of his work, the number of young Australians and their families whose lives have been improved, and the value of his contribution to the nation cannot ever fully be measured,” Mr Rudd said.
The Melbourne University professor s was in Ireland last year as a visiting professor at UCD’s School of Medicine. In an interview with Irish Medical Times last September (www.imt.ie/opinion/2009/09/reengineering_youth_mental_hea.html), Prof McGorry said the current mental health system for young adults in this country was virtually ‘nonexistent’.
“Young people with emerging problems have really nowhere to go. There is no expertise; no professional field properly equipped to respond to them,” he said.
Prof McGorry, who is also a Director of the National Youth Mental Health Foundation (Headspace), has led wide-ranging reform in the organisation and delivery of mental health services for teenagers and young adults in Australia and is a world expert on early intervention for severe mental illness in young adults.
Headspace currently operates 30 centres across Australia offering young people free and low-cost access to a range of primary care, mental health and alcohol/other drugs programmes.
Providing a more youth-friendly environment in the form of one-stop-shops has proven key to tackling the problem in Australia, and is being successfully adopted by Headstrong – the Irish national centre for youth mental health. However, while Prof McGorry acknowledged various projects were springing up in Ireland, he feared nothing was being done systematically.