> ARC Grant with Inspire

> Helen Christensen, Director of the Centre for Mental Health Research

The University of Sydney in collaboration with The Inspire Foundation were successful in obtaining an ARC Linkage Grant of $357,860 (2008 - 2010) for the study "Understanding and preventing mental health difficulties in young Australian men using the Internet". This project will build an evidence base which explores how innovative on-line strategies and social marketing can effectively promote help seeking behaviour and improve mental health outcomes for young men.

The research will take place over three stages:
(1) nationwide surveys and focus groups with young males on issues relating to mental health, help-seeking and the Internet and related technologies;
(2) development of the community awareness, male youth engagement strategy and website initiative, informed by the findings of stage one; and
(3) a randomised controlled trial to evaluate the efficacy of the community awareness, youth engagement strategy and website initiative for young males.

Helen Christensen is an international leader in the field of e-mental health and has been the primary developer of MoodGYM, a program of CBT delivered on an internet web site as well as a codeveloper of a number of other highly acclaimed sites. She has also been a leader in developing approaches for the assessment ehealth interventions. More recently, her focus has been the evaluation through randomised controlled trials of e-health approaches in general practice (1 trial), schools (3 trials), and call centres (1 trial).

She has also conducted theoretically driven work in dementia and cognitive ageing including areas such as inter-individual variability, mild cognitive impairment, and risk factors and moderators of outcome in ageing, and evaluations of the common factor and brain reserve hypotheses.

She is the Director of the Centre for Mental Health Research at the Australian National University, a member of the NHMRC Training Awards Committee, a member of the Executive of the International Society for Research into Internet Interventions, a member of the Headspace Evaluation Committee, and the Research Committee of Orygen Research Centre. She is on the Board of Directors of the Australian Foundation for Mental Health Research, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences Australia and is a NHMRC Principal Research Fellow.

She currently holds NHMRC or HRC of NZ grants of more than $7M, including a capacity building grant supporting six post docs at the Centre for Mental Health Research. Additionally she holds ARC, beyondblue, and APHCRI grants and has service support from the Department of Health and Ageing. She is the primary supervisor for 6 PhD students, and a panel supervisor of a further 5.