Research grants have been awarded to Monash University in the effort to improve the state’s mental health sector on a systemic level.

Monash has received two of five grants offered by the Victorian Government in its $10 million Mental Illness Research Fund. The grants will cover projects to assess the focus of community support services (worth $2.33 million) and a $1.8 million award to continue research into support services for parents with a mental illness.

 

One project is titled ‘PULSAR’ and will seek to adapt and test the usefulness of a set of training materials and organisational change techniques first used in the UK, with particular focus on how they can be suited to the Victorian context.

“The PULSAR project is expected to shed light on how clinical mental health, primary care and community support services can collaborate effectively and support people with mental illness to achieve their personal recovery goals,” project leader Professor Graham Meadows from the School of Psychology and Psychiatry said, “we will also be taking the novel step of developing and testing training materials based around these principles for the primary mental health care team.”

Associate Professor Darryl Maybery of Monash University’s Department of Rural and Indigenous Health and Dr Andrea Reupert from Education (Krongold Centre) were awarded $1.8 million to continue their research into support services for parents with a mental illness, titled ‘Developing an Australian-first recovery model for parents in Victorian mental health and family services’.

“The key question to be addressed by this project is how we can improve longer-term recovery of people with severe mental illness by addressing their parenting role as a core part of their treatment,” Associate Professor Maybery said, “we know that between 21 and 23 per cent of all children at some stage have a parent with a mental health problem... family interventions have important mental illness prevention benefits for children.”

Details of all projects to receive grants from the Mental Illness Research Fund are available online.