Erminia Colucci

Dr Erminia Colucci is currently a lecturer and academic lead at the Centre for Psychiatry at Queen Mary University of London (UK). From 2007 till 2015, she was a Research fellow and Lecturer at the Cultural and Global Mental Health Unit, University of Melbourne. Her main area of research and training is in Cultural and Global Mental Health with a focus on low-middle income countries and immigrant and refugee populations. She is particularly interested in suicide prevention, human rights in mental health, domestic violence, refugee mental health, lived experiences, and culturally-appropriate applied research methods - including arts-based/visual methods. Recently, she was awarded the Andrej Marusic Award by the International Association for Suicide Prevention and was nominated for the Jim Birley prize in human rights and mental health for her 'Breaking the chains' project: a visual ethnography about practices of restraint and confinement of people with mental illness in Indonesia (https://movie-ment.org/breakingthechains). In 2008 she completed a PhD in Cultural Psychiatry with a dissertation on ‘The cultural meanings of suicide: A comparison between Australian, Indian and Italian students’, with the University of Queensland (Australia), for which she was awarded the Suicide Prevention Australia Emerging Researcher LIFE Award, the Dr Helen Row–Zonta Memorial Prize and The University of Queensland Travel Award. Prior to this, she worked in Italy as a clinical psychologist, after completing studies in Clinical and Community Psychology at the University of Padua (Italy). Erminia also completed a MPhil in Ethnographic Documentary (Visual Anthropology) at the University of Manchester and use photo and film-documentary in her research, advocacy and teaching activities. Erminia has presented at various national/international conferences and published in several academic journals and books. In addition to being the main investigator in interdisciplinary research projects in countries across the Asia-Pacific and in Europe, she has held lecturing and training positions in Japan, India, Italy and the Philippines. Erminia is also involved in public engagement and advocacy activities in cultural and global mental health. Erminia is the chair of the International Association for Suicide Prevention SIG in Culture and Suicidal Behaviour, co-chair of the World Association of Cultural Psychiatry SIG on Arts, Media and Mental Health and founder of movie-ment (https://movie-ment.org) and Aperture, the first Asia-Pacific ethnographic documentary festival. She is also Honorary Research Fellow at the Global and Cultural Mental Health Unit at The University of Melbourne. From this University, Erminia was awarded an Early Career Research Award to conduct an ethnographic documentary-based project about violence against women and suicide prevention in the Philippines, which is currently under completion.