Rate My Professor Helen Correia

Helen Correia is a clinical psychologist and former Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychology and Exercise Science at Murdoch University, where she completed her Bachelor's degree in 1996 and her Master's and PhD in 2003. Her doctoral thesis, titled 'Crazy, Sad or Just Different: Evolving Representations of Mental Illness and the Mentally Ill During Psychology Education,' explored perceptions of mental illness. Throughout her career, she has worked extensively in Western Australia and New South Wales across diverse settings, including health departments, community mental health services, university environments, private practice, and workplace mental health consultancies. As a certified Compassionate Mind Training facilitator, she specializes in compassion-based approaches to address anxiety, stress, depression, trauma, physical health conditions, loss and bereavement, and relationship issues, particularly those involving carers.

Correia's research focuses on mindfulness and self-compassion interventions, chronic pain validation and invalidation, posttraumatic stress symptoms, schema therapy, and the wellbeing of carers for people with multiple sclerosis. Her publications have received approximately 780 citations. Key works include 'Perfectionism, self-compassion, and general self-efficacy between those with and without chronic pain' (2025), 'Limited evidence for the impact of transcranial direct current stimulation on inhibitory function: A systematic review and meta-analysis' (2024), 'An 8-week compassion and mindfulness-based exposure therapy program improves posttraumatic stress symptoms' (2023), 'The YSQ-R: Predictive Validity and Comparison to the Short and Long Form Young Schema Questionnaire' (2023), 'Exploring COVID-19 experiences for persons with multiple sclerosis and carers: An Australian qualitative study' (2023), 'The Pain-Invalidation Scale: Measuring Patient Perceptions of Invalidation' (2022), 'Defining pain-validation: The importance of validation in reducing the stresses of chronic pain' (2022), 'BRiTE Mind: Introducing Mindfulness to Cultivate Personal and Professional Wellbeing' (2020), and 'The Impact of a Brief Embedded Mindfulness-Based Program on Veterinary Students' Wellbeing' (2017). She has supervised numerous doctoral theses on topics including mindfulness in professional training, pain psychosocial factors, substance attachment, and technology use impacts. Correia contributed to initiatives such as the WeCare project for MS carers, the Eight Weeks to Stress Less program, and studies on parental smartphone use and parent-child relationships. She taught courses like PSY388 Psychology: Abnormal Behaviour and PSY669 Psychotherapy in Practice.