Erminia Colucci

Erminia Colucci
Middlesex University · Department of Psychology

PhD Cultural Psychiatry
Looking for collaborators and sponsors/funders for community-based suicide prevention in LMICs and humanitarian settings

About

74
Publications
63,906
Reads
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1,976
Citations
Introduction
Based at Middlesex University London, Erminia researches in Applied Psychology, Cultural Psychiatry and Global Mental Health. Erminia uses qualitative and arts-based/visual methods in her research in Low and Middle Income countries and with people from immigrant and refugee backgrounds. She is currently funded by MRC and ESRC/AHRC grants. One of her current projects is 'Together for Mental Health' and suicide prevention among internally displaced Syrian children, and in Indonesia and Pakistan.
Additional affiliations
February 2015 - February 2017
University of Melbourne
Position
  • Lecturer and Lead, MSc Transcultural Mental Healthcare and MSc Mental Health and Law

Publications

Publications (74)
Article
Full-text available
In March 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 outbreak a pandemic. The Section on Suicidology and Suicide Prevention of the European Psychiatric Association (EPA) wants to raise awareness about the potential increase in mental health disorders and suicides as a result of the socio-economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic,...
Article
Background An understanding of the cultural aspects of suicidal behavior is essential for the development of culturally appropriate suicide prevention and intervention strategies. Aims This study explored the attitudes toward youth suicide in 686 Italian, Indian and Australian undergraduate students (18–24 years old). Method A 21-item suicide att...
Article
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Background: Mental health services in Indonesia are developing rapidly in response to national and global health policy to support people living with psychosis. This presents a unique opportunity for civic engagement, the active involvement of patients, carers and communities in mental health care, to shape emergent services. In-depth explorations...
Article
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Introduction: Civic engagement (CE) has the potential to transform mental health services and could be particularly important for low and middle-income countries (LMICs), which are rapidly developing to respond to the burden of poor mental health. Research from high income countries has found many challenges associated with the meaningful implemen...
Article
Access to mental healthcare in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) is one of the greatest challenges in public health today. One suggestion for improving accessibility is through collaboration between biomedical practitioners and traditional healers. This paper reviews studies of traditional healers’ and biomedical practitioners’ perceptions o...
Article
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Background: Public engagement events are an important early strategy in developing a meaningful research agenda, which is more impactful and beneficial to the population. Evidence indicates the potential of such activities to promote mental health literacy. However, this has not yet been explored in Indonesia. Aim: This paper describes a mental...
Article
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Background Patient and public involvement (PPI) has the potential to strengthen mental health systems in Indonesia and improve care for people living with psychosis. Current evidence from other parts of the world demonstrates the need to understand the contexts in which PPI is to be enacted to ensure optimal implementation. Objective To understand...
Article
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Objective In 2017 the number of refugees around the world reached 25.4 million. These people make up one of the most vulnerable populations globally. This study aims to understand the strategies refugees used to cope with the impact on their mental health by the difficult pre- and post-resettlement circumstances they encountered. Methods A systema...
Article
Ten individuals of immigrant or refugee background, who had experienced mental health or emotional issues, participated in an immersive workshop to create digital stories as part of a national multicultural mental health initiative. Known collectively as ‘Finding our way’, the stories combine the power of first-person narrative with digital technol...
Article
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Background Indonesia has the highest rate of years of life lost to disability or early death from Schizophrenia than any other country in the world. More than 90% of people with mental illness do not get any treatment and tens of thousands of people with psychosis are illegally detained (‘pasung’) in the family home. Civic engagement, a core part o...
Article
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The connection between spirituality and wellbeing, including its benefits for physical and mental health, has been recognized in the Eastern cultures for a very long time, although the sharp division between science and religion has caused, for the most part, its neglect inWestern cultures until recently. Nevertheless, limited efforts have been mad...
Article
Objective: Suicide rates vary across different cultural groups and some immigrant or refugee populations display higher risk for suicide. This study aimed to produce guidelines to help members of the public provide assistance to a person from an immigrant or refugee background who is having suicidal thoughts or displaying suicidal behaviour. Method...
Article
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Background: A number of Delphi expert consensus studies have been carried out with different countries and cultural groups to develop guidelines on how a member of the public should provide assistance to a person who is suicidal. The present study aimed to determine whether cross-culturally generalizable suicide first aid actions are possible by c...
Article
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Forgiveness has proven to be beneficial for the physical and mental health of individuals. In sufferers of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after man-made traumatic events, it is often believed to have a positive effect to forgive the transgressor. This systematic review identifies and presents a summary ofthe literature into the association of...
Article
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Dr Erminia Colucci and colleagues watch 'Anatomy of a Suicide' https://thepsychologist.bps.org.uk/volume-30/august-2017/unhelpful-dissection
Article
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This systematic review gathers data from the existing literature on the prevalence and course of psychiatric disorders among unaccompanied refugee minors (URMs). The databases PsychINFO, PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science were searched and reference lists of papers were also manually examined to identify relevant articles. Peer-reviewed journal arti...
Thesis
Background: One in four people suffer from a mental illness globally. Research has shown that dance has many benefits for and mental health. Thus, dance movement therapy has emerged in the field of psychotherapy. Dance movement therapy is a movement based psychotherapeutic approach which uses body movements to encourage emotional, social, cognitive...
Article
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The World Health Organization report Preventing Suicide: A Global Imperative provides governments with guidance for comprehensive suicide prevention strategies. However, it does not mention the role that compulsory admission to hospital of psychiatric patients should have in policies for suicide prevention. This was a missed opportunity for interna...
Article
The aim of this study was to establish mental health and suicide research priorities for people from immigrant and refugee background in Australia. This paper focuses on the data relevant to the development of the suicide research agenda. This study was conducted using Delphi consensus method with two rounds of online questionnaires. A total of 138...
Article
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Limited research has been conducted worldwide on the experiences that children and young people from refugee backgrounds have with mental health services, despite evidence that they have significant vulnerability to the development of mental health problems and to suicidal behaviour and that those with mental ill-health typically underutilise servi...
Article
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Background Sri Lanka has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Gatekeeper programs aimed at specific target groups could be a promising suicide prevention strategy in the country. The aim of this study was to develop guidelines that help members of the public to provide first aid to persons in Sri Lanka who are at risk of suicide. Methods...
Article
Full-text available
Images in cultural psychiatry Free from pasung: A story of chaining and freedom in Indonesia told through painting, poetry and narration. Abstract. Thousands of people worldwide live in isolation, chained, or inside "animal cages", naked, undernourished and often living in their own excrements because of mental health problems. This has been identi...
Article
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Refugee young people have been identified as a group with high risk for mental health problems, due to their experience of trauma, forced migration, and stressors associated with settlement. A high prevalence of mental health problems is reported in this group, however some research suggests refugee young people have low rates of mental health serv...
Article
Full-text available
In Indonesia there is a pressing need to scale up mental health services due to a substantial unmet need for mental health care. Integrating psychologists into primary health care can potentially deliver affordable mental health services to communities and help to close the treatment gap. Australia is one of the pioneers in integrating mental healt...
Article
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Purpose of review: Violence against women and children is increasingly recognized as an important and urgent public health, social and human rights issue cutting across geographical, socioeconomic and cultural boundaries. There is a large and growing body of literature that demonstrates the negative impact of such violence on the victim's mental a...
Article
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Enhancing primary health care to incorporate mental health services is a key strategy for closing the treatment gap for people with mental disorders. The integration of psychological care into primary health care is a critical step in addressing poor access to mental health specialists. As the psychology profession is increasingly called upon to pr...
Article
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A range of service development initiatives has been implemented in Australia to improve the cultural responsiveness of mental health services. In Victoria, cultural portfolio holders (CPHs) are responsible for leading service development activities that address the needs of individuals and families from different cultural backgrounds. The aim of th...
Article
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Mental health is a critical issue in Indonesia, since its population ranks among the top five in the world and the prevalence of common mental disorders is 11.6% of the adult population. However, the need to build an effective mental health-care system that is accessible to the whole population has only been recently addressed. The Aceh tsunami in...
Article
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Domestic/family violence is a widespread major public health and human rights violation issue that runs across ethno-cultural affiliations and economic status. Relative to the actual incidence of family violence, use of services is low, and delayed for years after onset, within the broader Victorian and Australian community. Utilization is even low...
Conference Paper
There is a paucity of cross-cultural research on youth suicidal behaviour. An understanding of the cultural aspects of suicidal behaviour is essential for the development of culturally appropriate suicide prevention and intervention strategies. In this study, meanings, cultural representations, attitudes, values and beliefs regarding youth suicide...
Article
Full-text available
People from refugee background are known to be vulnerable to the development of mental health problems and to suicide because of the pre-migration events they have experienced and the difficulties associated with moving from their homeland to a usually different society. Concerns have been expressed that, in spite of this, young refugees' rates of...
Article
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In this article, the authors explored the associations between suicide rates and a large number of sociocultural indexes, within the sociological framework provided by Durkheim and taking into account recent sociological theories. The analyses were performed on a sample of 87 nations and a subsample of posttraditional societies. The authors found s...
Book
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Why understanding the role of culture can help prevent suicide The increasing domination of biological approaches in suicide research and prevention, at the expense of social and cultural understanding, is severely harming our ability to stop people dying – so run the clearly set out arguments and evidence in this lucid book by leading social scien...
Article
Parallel to the growing interest in spiritual life in mainstream culture, in Western culture there hasbeen an increasing distinction between religion and spirituality. This article defines the concept of spiritualityand its constitutive elements and presents evidence from the literature to show that, in spite of its importancefor mental health pati...
Article
Recenti ricerche hanno pienamente mostrato che, se confrontati col resto della popolazione, gli artisti in generale, ma più nello specifico alcune categorie in misura maggiore, si distinguono per un tasso di suicidi sproporzionato, suicidi preceduti talvolta da malattie psichiatriche. Esiste un fenomeno culturale, che ha origine nel romanticismo, c...
Article
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This study aimed to develop guidelines for how a member of the Japanese public should provide mental health first aid to a person who is suicidal. The guidelines were produced by developing a questionnaire containing possible first aid actions and asking an expert panel of 32 Japanese mental health professionals to rate whether each action should b...
Article
The inner experience of spiritual and religious feelings is an integral part of the everyday lives of many individuals. For over 100 years the role of religion as a deterrent to suicidal behavior has been studied in various disciplines. We attempt to systematize the existing literature investigating the relationship between religion/spirituality an...
Article
Full-text available
This study aimed to develop guidelines for how a member of the Filipino public should provide mental health first aid to a person who is suicidal. The guidelines were produced by developing a questionnaire containing possible first aid actions and asking an expert panel of 34 Filipino mental health clinicians to rate whether each action should be i...
Data
Table of data showing the items included in the Delphi survey and the endorsement levels from the Indian panel members.
Data
First aid guidelines for India. This file may be distributed freely, with the authorship and copyright details intact. Please do not alter the text or remove the authorship and copyright details.
Article
Full-text available
This study aimed to develop guidelines for how a member of the Indian public should provide mental health first aid to a person who is suicidal. The guidelines were produced by developing a questionnaire containing possible first aid actions and asking an expert panel of Indian mental health clinicians to rate whether each action should be included...
Article
Full-text available
The aim of this project was to investigate in members of the Vietnamese community in Melbourne the impact of Mental Health First Aid (MHFA) training on attitudes to people with mental illness and on knowledge about mental disorders. Our hypotheses were that at the end of the training participants would have increased knowledge of mental disorders a...
Article
The inner experience of spiritual and religious feelings is an integral part of the everyday lives of many individuals. For over 100 years the role of religion as a deterrent to suicidal behavior has been studied in various disciplines. We attempt to systematize the existing literature investigating the relationship between religion/spirituality an...
Chapter
Full-text available
In spite of the diffusion of focus groups method across disciplines and in several areas of research, and although scholars have indicated the utility of this method in cross-cultural research and research with ethnic minority groups, focus groups have been used in this kind of study to a limited extent. One of the reasons for this might be due to...
Article
Full-text available
Parallel to the growing interest in spiritual life in mainstream culture, in Western culture there has been an increasing distinction between religion and spirituality. This article defines the concept of spirituality and its constitutive elements and presents evidence from the literature to show that, in spite of its importance for mental health p...
Article
Full-text available
Interest in focus group discussions has grown recently, and so has the recognition of them as a valuable method for qualitative data collection. Despite increasing popularity, they are not an easy option, and moderators must find appropriate ways to approach participants to achieve good-quality data. A path to reach this aim is the inclusion in the...
Article
The study of ethnocultural aspects of suicidal behaviour is, at the moment, still a neglected area. The relatively few studies available are mainly on adults; young people usually are not examined separately. The authors reviewed 82 publications on youth suicide that have addressed, to different degrees, the ethnicity/culture of the population stud...
Article
Full-text available
Different scholars have expressed the same regret for the lack of research on ethnocultural differences in youth suicide behavior and the need to conduct more comparative studies, necessary to develop culturally responsive prevention and intervention strategies. The authors reviewed 82 publications on youth suicide that have considered, to differen...
Article
Full-text available
Culture is a central but debated concept in many disciplines and its complexity may become an even bigger source of argument in Suicidology. In spite of the intricacy of the study of this construct, the paper illustrates that various scholars have recognised the relevance of culture and ethnicity in the understanding of suicidal behaviour. The auth...
Article
Aim. The aim of this study was to attempt to assess age-related suicide risk through analysis of risk factors and sociodemographic variables drawn from a sample of 511 suicides aged between 18 and 96 years, who died in the city and province of Padua between 1990 and 1999. Method. Thanks to an invaluable cooperation agreement with the Court of Padua...

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