Our projects focus on (i) genetic and environmental risk factors over the lifecourse for schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, other psychotic disorders and intellectual disability and (ii) the prevalence and profile of psychotic illness.  Our Unit is the coordinating centre for the Australian National Survey of High Impact Psychosis (SHIP).

Projects

• Pathways of risk from conception to disease - studying genetic and environmental risk factors over the lifecourse for schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders using a high risk cohort of offspring of women with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and other psychotic disorders
• Survey of High Impact Psychosis (SHIP) - a National survey examining the prevalence and profile of psychosis, and identifying factors associated with good outcome in psychosis
• North Metro Survey of High Impact Psychosis (North Metro SHIP) - a replication of the the national SHIP survey in the North Metropolitan Area Health Services Mental Health
• Schizophrenia and criminal offending - using a whole-of-population approach to provide reliable data on the association between offending and severe mental illness
• Psychiatric morbidity and intellectual disability - studying the relationship between intellectual disability and psychiatric illness, with a special focus on schizophrenia and co-occurring intellectual disability
• Patterns of service use for people who have had a psychiatric inpatient admission - the construction of a database for exploring inpatient demand within the mental health system
• Long-term treatment outcomes in early psychosis specialist services - an evaluation of the long term effects of treatment in a specialist early intervention in psychosis (EIP) service

Other research

• The first Australian national study of low prevalence (psychotic) disorders 1997-98
• Diagnostic Interview for Psychosis (DIP): Revised version incorporating DSM-IV and ICD-10 diagnostic classification systems
  
• Diagnostic Interview for Psychosis (DIP): Italian, Norwegian, Greek, Indonesian, Bulgarian and other translations
  
• Relationship between area of residence, criminal activity and schizophrenia
  
• Reproductive pathology in women with severe mental illness
• Measuring obstetric complications in women with severe mental illness
  
• Record linkage and the validation of case register data in the study of the epidemiology of psychotic disorders
  
• Season of birth and schizophrenia
  
• In utero exposure to influenza and schizophrenia
  
• Psychiatric outpatients seen once only in Verona and Perth: a retrospective case register study