Patrick McGorry (b.1952), psychiatrist and Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, gained his initial medical degree at the University of Sydney and worked in the United Kingdom and Newcastle, New South Wales, before completing his doctorate in medicine at Monash University in 1991. The following year he began his association with the University of Melbourne, where in 1996 he became Founding Director of the mental health service ORYGEN Youth Health (in 2006 he became Executive Director of the ORYGEN Research Centre, one of ORYGEN’s three arms). The organisation has made Australia a world leader in the development of preventive and early intervention strategies for emerging mental disorders in people aged between 12 and 25 years. Its activities include service development, clinical trials and studies examining the clinical neurobiology of the onset phase of psychotic, mood, and substance use disorders.
McGorry has advised governments at state and federal levels in Australia, and internationally especially in Canada, the United States, Scandinavia, Germany, the UK and Ireland. His other areas of expertise include refugee and asylum-seeker mental health, torture and trauma, suicide and substance use disorders. His is also a Director of the National Youth Mental Health Foundation (headspace). Author of six books on psychiatry and more than 250 scholarly articles, McGorry was Australian of the Year for 2010, and in 2016 he became the first-ever psychiatrist to be elected as a fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.
