Patrick McGorry

Who is Patrick McGorry?

Patrick Dennistoun McGorry AO is an Irish-born Australian psychiatrist known for his development of the early intervention services for youth.

McGorry is Professor of Youth Mental Health at the University of Melbourne. He has written numerous peer reviewed articles, published in journals including The Lancet, the British Journal of Psychiatry, the American Journal of Psychiatry and the Medical Journal of Australia. He is executive director of Orygen Youth Health and founding editor of Early Intervention in Psychiatry published by the International Early Psychosis Association. McGorry also advocated strongly for the establishment of the Australian government funded National Youth Mental Health Foundation, which became headspace, and is a founding board member of that organisation.

McGorry and his colleagues developed an approach for young people who have symptoms of psychosis for the first time, based at the EPPIC clinic in Melbourne. This EPPIC clinic has played a key part in an early psychosis treatment paradigm for psychiatry and has led to significant reform of mental health services, especially in the United Kingdom. The EPPIC clinic is best represented by the catch phrase "A stitch in time" and its development of a service for those at risk of developing psychosis. Initial evaluations of EPPIC showed that it was not only effective compared to the previous traditional model of care but that it was also cost effective. Some critics have recently disputed these findings. In the past two decades more rigorous randomised evaluations in England and Denmark have shown that early intervention is effective over the first two years of care at least, but when patients return to traditional care some of the gains are lost. Canadian data indicates that if patients remain in early intervention services for five years the gains are sustained. One critic has alleged that McGorry has "systematically misled" the Australian government about the nature and implications of his evaluation study on EPPIC by misstating the description of the control group. While more rigorous evaluations of early intervention services have been carried out in other countries, a systematic review of these studies concluded: "There is some support for specialised early intervention services, but further trials would be desirable, and there is a question of whether gains are maintained." McGorry has claimed that early intervention services can save money, but this has also been questioned by a recent review of the evidence. Professor McGorry was awarded the Centenary Medal in 2003 in recognition of his work on the EPPIC programme.