Public Lecture by Prof. Deborah Turnbull
“The importance of mental health”
Professor Deborah Turnbull MPsych(Clin), PhD from University of Adelaide visited Faculty of Psychology Airlangga University on Tuesday, May 16th 2017. She came here to give a public lecture about mental health. This lecture was attended by 100 students from Bachelor to Doctoral Degree, and held at Ruang Sidang 1 Faculty of Psychology Airlangga University.
The purpose of this visit is to tighten the bond between Universitas Airlangga and University of Adelaide. Beside that, this public lecture is a good opportunity to expand the knowledge of Airlangga University Students. First, she introduce about her country and University of Adelaide to the students. After that, she begins her lecture.
Professor Turnbull discuss about the importance of mental health in her lecture by presenting some of her student’s project. Overall the project was called “Improving mental health over the lifespan in Australia”. There are three main projects, the first one is called “Childhood Disability: West Timor.” The aim of this project is to create a framework about the policy statement to help children in West Timor. The second project, “Improving wellbeing in Australia Adolescence,” is a project based inspired by a story from one of the clients that suffer brain injuries. This project is developed from a theory called Positive Psychology. Positive Psychology pays attention to someone’s strength and reinforces it than looking at someone’s weakness. The last project is called “Children with cancer in rural areas”.
Prof. Turnbull said that “It is very important to make people aware about their mental health.” She also said that depression and anxiety is something that we should fight. Therefore, we, from Department of Psychology must know, understand, and try to formulate what kind of intervention that can be used to solve all the problem about mental illnesses.
