Spirituality, religion and mental health in young people

Dr. Michael Dudley works as a psychiatrist at Sydney Children's and Prince of Wales Hospitals, and is a senior lecturer in Psychiatry at the University of New South Wales. He specialises in and researches suicide and self-harm among young people, and chairs Suicide Prevention Australia (SPA), a non-government organisation which provides leadership, education and advocacy for suicide prevention in Australia. He also works with young refugees and researches adolescent resilience. He has been publicly outspoken about the threat posed by current government policies for the mental health of refugee young people. He is currently editing (with Fran Gale and Derrick Silove) a book on Human Rights and Mental Health, for Oxford University press. Michael has interests in psychiatry, culture and human rights, and has written about the Nazi psychiatrists; contradictory Australian national policies on suicide prevention, especially in relation to asylum-seekers; the image of psychiatry in contemporary Australian literature; and the relationship of religion, spirituality and psychiatry.