A visit to Prince of Wales Mental Health

Written by Dr. Marshall Korenblum

The office of Dr. Michael Dudley is dominated by stacks of journals, papers and books which seem to be strewn randomly across chairs, desks and the floor. A cleaning lady's nightmare and no picnic if you have obsessive compulsive disorder. He himself is also mildly dishevelled, wearing no jacket, no tie an open shirt and casual pants.

Based on this presentation you might wonder if he could find his own pen. And yet, after meeting with him for 1 1/2 hours on the fifth day of our VTT trip, I was blown away by his warmth, sensitivity, humour and encyclopedic grasp of what causes teenagers to hurt and or kill themselves. He is, after all, the Chairman of "Suicide Prevention Australia", a world-renowned national program which has successfully reduced the suicide rate among young people over the last ten years.

He is also researching the needs of immigrants and refugee teens, especially those who have been traumatized by war in their home countries and he is deeply concerned about indigenous (aboriginal) youth who have been horribly marginalized and even manipulated by organized crime in Australia.

I will definitely return to Canada with greater insight into what works in suicide prevention in young people and hope to maintain contact with him so that we can adapt some of Australia's approaches to this problem to our culture and content.

Lest you think the conversation was all one way, you should know that Dr. Dudley thought Toronto's (Hincks-Dellcrest Centre's) method of teaching psychology, social work and psychiatry students was "cutting edge", "worthy of replication" and he was going to speak to his colleagues about trying to incorporate some of our best practices into their teaching program. (I had informed him of our extensive use of one-way mirrors, "bug in the ear", video-taping therapy sessions for supervision, multi-disciplinary assessment teams and complete integration of service, education and research).