Rate My Professor Sarah Gordon

Associate Professor Sarah Gordon is an affiliate associate professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington, within the Faculty of Medicine. She holds BSc, LLB, MBHL, and PhD degrees in Psychological Medicine from the University of Otago, with her PhD completed in 2010. Her academic pursuits were influenced by personal experiences of mental illness, focusing on psychology, medical law, bioethics, and psychological medicine. Since 2011, Gordon has worked as a service user academic at the University of Otago. In that year, she founded the World of Difference programme, a service-user-led research group dedicated to ending discrimination, promoting recovery, inclusion, and human rights for people experiencing mental distress. She remains an affiliated leader of this initiative and leads population mental health and health services research.

Gordon's research specializations include reducing stigma and discrimination linked to mental distress, especially among medical students and police; promoting recovery-oriented mental health services aligned with global service delivery shifts; and exploring legal coercion, human rights under the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, supported decision-making, and mental health advance preference statements. She employs service user-led and co-produced research methods, emphasizing meaningful involvement from conception to execution. Key publications comprise 'Growing the lived experience voice in psychiatry education and training' (2024), 'Very useful, but do carefully: Mental health researcher views on establishing a Mental Health Expert Consumer Researcher Group' (2019, Journal of Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing), 'How did I not see that? Perspectives of nonconsumer mental health researchers on the benefits of collaborative research with consumers' (2018, Issues in Mental Health Nursing), 'I don't think we've quite got there yet: The experience of allyship for mental health consumer researchers' (2018), and 'Definitions of social inclusion and social exclusion: perceptions of New Zealand mental health service users' (2017, International Journal of Culture and Mental Health). Her scholarship has amassed over 700 citations. Gordon secured a $1,399,977 Health Research Council grant in 2022 for enabling supported decision-making through mental health advance preference statements. She has advanced service user academia by co-hosting and convening its symposium, impacting mental health education, research, and policy.