| Dr Heather Rowe |
 | Senior Research Fellow |
| Biography |
Dr Rowe is a health scientist with a background in genetics, psychology and health promotion. She has been on the academic staff at the Key Centre since 2000.
Her program of research in the field of women’s mental health promotion positions women’s mental health in its social, economic, cultural and political contexts. It promotes an understanding of inequalities in mental health as multi-factorially determined, and as a product of circumstance including gender disadvantage, rather than intra-psychic pathology.
The program includes research projects investigating factors affecting mental health at the individual level (unplanned pregnancy and abortion; exposure to trauma; social correlates of mental health service usage, and mental illness labelling); at the health service level (assisted reproductive technology, pregnancy advisory services; prenatal genetic screening, caesarean section), and at the community level (workplace discrimination during pregnancy; mainstreaming mental health in primary care). The program includes evaluation research for primary prevention (a universal psycho-educational program for first-time parents of newborns) and secondary prevention (early parenting services; social work program for disadvantaged clients of early parenting services; psycho-educational intervention for pregnant survivors of trauma).
Outcomes of this program include the development, evaluation and knowledge exchange, in health care settings and the community, of interventions addressing key modifiable social determinants to improve mental health in diverse groups of women during the childbearing year.
For more information including Dr Rowe's qualifications, publications, research grants and classifications, visit Find an Expert.