Our Track Record

The Critical and Ethical Mental Health team have a strong record in furthering the groups' mission and objectives.

1. Psychiatric epidemiology
   Melissa has master's degrees in clinical epidemiology and clinical psychology. Her PhD included in-depth analysis of epidemiological and clinical evidence related to depression and suicide. She has published articles and letters on psychiatric epidemiology in the British Journal of Psychiatry, the Medical Journal of Australia, and the BMJ. She has reviewed epidemiological articles for the British Journal of Psychiatry and PLoS Medicine.
    
2. Suicide: causes, relationship to mental illness and prevention
   Jon and Melissa have critiqued misleading claims about the relationship between suicide and psychiatric illness and treatment for over a decade, as reflected in the debate included in appendix B. Melissa's PhD thesis included in-depth analysis of epidemiological and clinical evidence related to the aetiology and prevention of suicide.
    
3. Research methodology
   Jon, John and Melissa have all been chief investigators in competitively funded research projects. Melissa taught research methods at a postgraduate level for six years at Flinders University, in the Department of Public Health and the Discipline of General Practice. She is an active participant in the Flinders Centre for Epidemiology and Biostatistics Journal Club. Jon teaches critical appraisal to psychiatry trainees. Additionally, Jon led the research team that has submitted a ground-breaking paper to the BMJ; the first time an independent research team has reanalysed previously published data, reaching radically different conclusions to that of the initial published paper, and raising serious concerns about the standard of publication of psychotropic drug trials.
    
4. Publishing ethics, including ghostwriting
   Melissa has published articles on citation content misrepresentation (misleading reporting of the content of cited sources) (Raven 2013; Raven 2012; Jureidini & Raven 2012; Raven 2010), and presented on the misrepresentation of research evidence. Jon has published on ghostwriting, and has been involved in a series of initiatives aimed at having the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry retract a misleading, ghost-written article. Anne teaches undergraduate students about the current problems with the medical literature, including undeclared conflicts of interest, ghost-writing, and misrepresentation of results in abstracts and discussions.
    
5. Quality use of medicines 
   Melissa and Jon have written several papers about psychopharmacology, problematic prescribing, and positive alternatives.
    
6. Relationships between health professionals and the pharmaceutical industry
   Jon and Melissa have published articles analysing and critiquing relationships between health professionals and industry, including conflict of interest. Jon has a special interest in Key Opinion Leaders, influential senior academics who are used by industry to market drugs.
    
7. Screening and early intervention in mental health
   Melissa has published articles critiquing screening and early intervention in mental health. She was invited to deliver a presentation, Early intervention in youth mental health: Weak evidence and strong spin, to the South Australian Faculty of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists in 2010. Jon and Melissa, in collaboration with prominent psychiatrists such as Allen Frances, Chair of the American Psychiatric Association's DSM-IV Task Force, have been prominent and successful public critics of initiatives such as the Healthy Kids Check, and the use of antipsychotic medications for people at high risk of developing psychiatric illness.
    
8. Psychiatric diagnosis/ phenomenology
   Jon has been a prominent critic of the ADHD concept for two decades. He established within the University of Adelaide the Paediatric Mental Health Training Unit (PMHTU) that promotes to medical students, family physicians, and educators a non-pathologising approach to young people's distress. Raven co-authored an American Family Physician article, Two Views on the DSM-5: The need for caution in diagnosing and treating mental disorders, with Allen Frances, and assisted him in writing his book, Saving Normal.
    
9. Health communication
   Jon and John have been part of two ARC-funded research teams that have carried out linguistic analysis of clinical handover.
    
10. Human rights
    Jureidini participated in the Australian Human Rights Commission review of children in immigration detention in 2014. He has published several papers critical of public policy in this area, and his advocacy for immigration detainees has been widely reported in the general media.