Rate My Professor Simon Adamson

Simon Adamson is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychological Medicine, Christchurch, at the University of Otago, Faculty of Medicine. He holds an MSc (Dist) from the University of Canterbury, a Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Psychology (DipClinPsych), and a PhD from the University of Otago. Throughout his career, he has focused on psychological medicine, particularly alcohol and drug problems. His research interests encompass the description, identification, and treatment of addictive disorders, including treatment outcomes, effectiveness, efficacy, prediction of treatment outcomes, and various methods of measuring outcomes. Adamson is affiliated with the National Addiction Centre at the University of Otago, Christchurch, where he contributes to research on substance use disorders, harm reduction, and related psychiatric comorbidities. He supervises postgraduate research on topics such as personality and addiction, consumer recovery in opioid substitution treatment, psychological adaptation to addiction, and co-existing mental health disorders with substance use.

Adamson's scholarly contributions include numerous peer-reviewed publications advancing knowledge in addiction treatment and policy. Notable works are 'Psychometric performance of the Cannabis Use Disorders Identification Test-Revised (CUDIT-R) in a youth clinical sample' (2025, Community Mental Health Journal, with Palmer, Schroder, and Wood), 'Māori preferences and practices in systemic health and social service collaborative practice' (2023, AlterNative, with McLachlan and Pitama), 'The New Zealand drug harms ranking study: A multi-criteria decision analysis' (2023, Journal of Psychopharmacology, with Crossin et al.), 'The New Zealand Illicit Drug Harms Index: How can it inform a health-based approach to drug use?' (2022, New Zealand Medical Journal, with Crossin, Boden, and Wilkins), and 'Cognitive functioning in opioid substitution treatment and the potential for cognitive remediation' (2021, Proceedings of the University of Otago Student Research Symposium, with Hayward, Jordan, and Douglas). His research has informed New Zealand's approaches to drug policy and clinical practice in addiction. Adamson has co-authored instruments like the CUDIT-R for screening cannabis use disorders, widely used in clinical settings.