2021 Robin Winkler Lecture

Understanding and improving the mental health of LGBTQA+ young people

The 2021 Robin Winkler Lecture by Associate Professor Ashleigh Lin, Program Head, Mental Health and Youth, Telethon Kids Institute

LGBTQA+ young people are at higher risk for poor mental health than their non-LGBTQA+ peers. This is particularly true for trans and gender diverse youth. Despite increased need for mental health care, LGBTQA+ young people often face barriers to safe, appropriate and affirming service provision. There is also a lack of understanding of the experiences of LGBTQA+ young people who live at the intersection of multiple identities, such as young people who are Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander and LGBTQA+.

Ashleigh described a program of research aimed at understanding the mental health of LGBTQA+ youth, and how we can improve it by developing interventions at the levels of the individual, the family, the mental health sector and society more broadly.

Associate Professor Ashleigh Lin is a NHMRC Career Development Fellow and Program Head of Mental Health and Youth at the Telethon Kids Institute in Perth. She is also Co-Director of Embrace @ Telethon Kids, WA’s first research centre for the mental health of children and young people from birth to age 25. Ashleigh’s research is focused on the mental health of young people, with particular interest in marginalised populations. Ashleigh completed a Master of Clinical Neuropsychology and PhD at the University of Melbourne. She held postdoctoral research positions at Orygen, the National Centre for Youth Mental Health and the University of Birmingham in the UK before taking up her role at the Telethon Kids Institute in 2014.

The Robin Winkler Lecture

This annual public lecture commemorates the work of Robin Winkler, a highly influential teacher and researcher at the UWA School of Psychological Science, whose work was guided by humanitarian values and a relentless questioning of accepted orthodoxies. He was a community psychologist and passionate advocate of the importance of equal access to psychological services, and of recognition of the social context in which treatment and research is being undertaken. He died at the age of 43 while heading the UWA Clinical Master’s program at the Psychology Clinic, which he established and which now bears his name. In the Oxford Handbook of the History of Psychology he is described as “a singular, crusading figure” in Australian psychology.

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