Professor Patrick McGorry is an Irish-born Australian psychiatrist known world-wide for his development of the early intervention services for youth. He is executive director of Orygen, the National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health, and founding editor of Early Intervention in Psychiatry, published by Wiley on behalf of the International Early Psychosis Association. Patrick McGorry also advocated strongly for the establishment of the Australian government funded National Youth Mental Health Foundation, which became Headspace, and is a founding board member of that organisation. In addition to his role as Executive Director, Patrick McGorry is Professor of Youth Mental Health at The University of Melbourne.
Professor has published over 500 peer reviewed articles in the major international journals including The Lancet, the British Journal of Psychiatry, the British Medical Journal, JAMA Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Molecular Psychiatry, Biological Psychiatry, and the Medical Journal of Australia. Over the past decade he has raised over $150m for mental health research. He has been played a key advocacy and advisory role to government and health system reform in many parts of the world.
He is currently President of the Society for Mental Health Research in Australia, President of the Schizophrenia International Research Society, and Treasurer of the International Early Psychosis Association (IEPA).
In 2010 Professor McGorry was selected as Australian of the Year and became an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO). In 2013 he received the Annual Research Award from the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Washington DC, and in 2015 was awarded the Lieber Prize for Schizophrenia Research by the US-based Brain and Behaviour Foundation (formerly NARSAD). In 2016 he became the first psychiatrist to be elected as a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science.