Dr Laura Hart

Dr. Laura Hart is a post-doctoral research fellow working in the Population Mental Health Group at the University of Melbourne. Dr. Hart has began working in the field with Professor Tony Jorm as a Research Assistant developing guidelines on mental health first aid to Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait people.

She completed her doctoral thesis in Mental Health First Aid for Eating Disorders. After her PhD, she began researching and developing the "teen Mental Health First Aid" course, a new training program for adolescents aged 16-18, about how to help their friends. This evidence-based school training was designed with and for young people with mental health problems and their friends. Dr. Hart was awarded a beyondblue Early Career Researcher grant to evaluate the program in 2013 and an Australian Rotary Health Project Grant to conduct a randomised controlled trial from 2014-2016 in four Victorian Secondary Schools. She has been working closely with Mental Health First Aid Australia to launch the teen MHFA program nationally in 2014. Dr. Hart has also been involved in the national evaluation of the first edition of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Mental Health First Aid program and its update to the second edition in 2012.Since 2012, Dr. Hart has also been completing a three-year postdoctoral research position at La Trobe University working on a program for parents of preschoolers to prevent body dissatisfaction, overweight and disordered eating developing childhood. The "Confident Body, Confident Child" program is being evaluated using a four-arm randomised controlled trial with 350 Victorian parents of children aged 2-6 years.The winner of multiple awards for outstanding research presentations, she is an experienced public speaker, regular presenter national and international scientific conferences, and often invited to facilitate workshops and planning days for NGOs. Dr. Hart's research interests continue to include community-based mental health literacy programs to increase early intervention and prevention of mental illness. Her work also involves youth mental health, research translation, eating disorders and body image, parenting and suicide prevention.

Find out more about Laura Hart's experience

Laura Hart's highlights

FEATURED Journal article

#Ihaveembraced: a pilot cross-sectional naturalistic evaluation of the documentary film Embrace and its potential associations with body image in adult women

Laura Hart's selected work

Development Of Gatekeeper Training To Improve The Capacity Of Aboriginal And Torres Strait..

Research Grant

How many people have eating disorders? We don't really know, and that's a worry

NEWS ARTICLE

Confident Body, Confident Child: Outcomes for Children of Parents Receiving a Universal Pa..

Journal article

Teen Mental Health First Aid Training: A Pilot Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial

Research Grant

The association of disordered eating with health-related quality of life in US young adult..

Journal article

An Evaluation Of Teen Mental Health First Aid: A Program To Train Adolescents To Better Su..

Research Grant

Projects

Displaying the 3 most recent projects by Laura Hart.

Development Of Gatekeeper Training To Improve The Capacity Of Aboriginal And Torres Strait Islander Communities To Prevent Youth Suicide

This project aims to develop and evaluate suicide gatekeeper training courses for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities and for ..

2015 - 2019

Completed

Teen Mental Health First Aid Training: A Pilot Cluster Randomised Controlled Trial

2014 - 2016

Completed

An Evaluation Of Teen Mental Health First Aid: A Program To Train Adolescents To Better Support Their Peers

2013 - 2014

Completed

3

Projects

Project Types

Research Grant

Scholarly Works

Displaying the 53 most recent scholarly works by Laura Hart.

#Ihaveembraced: a pilot cross-sectional naturalistic evaluation of the documentary film Embrace and its potential associations with body image in adult women

Zali Yager, Ivanka Prichard, Laura M Hart

Journal article | 2020 | BMC Women's Health

BACKGROUND: The aim of this project was to examine the qualitative responses of adult women who had seen the feature-length docume..

Confident Body, Confident Child: Outcomes for Children of Parents Receiving a Universal Parenting Program to Promote Healthful Eating Patterns and Positive Body Image in Their Pre-Schoolers-An Exploratory RCT Extension

Katherine E Hill, Laura M Hart, Susan J Paxton

Journal article | 2020 | International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health

Objective: A four-arm randomized controlled trial (RCT) conducted in Victoria, Australia, previously evaluated parent-report outco..

The association of disordered eating with health-related quality of life in US young adults and effect modification by gender

Laura M Hart, Allegra R Gordon, Vishnudas Sarda, Jerel P Calzo, Kendrin R Sonneville, Mihail Samnaliev, S Bryn Austin

Journal article | 2020 | Quality of Life Research

PURPOSE: To examine the relationship of disordered eating behaviors and eating disorder (ED) diagnosis in young adults with health..

Understanding the Needs of Young People Who Engage in Self-Harm: A Qualitative Investigation

Sarah E Hetrick, Aruni Subasinghe, Kate Anglin, Laura Hart, Amy Morgan, Jo Robinson

Journal article | 2020 | Frontiers in Psychology

Self-harm is common and associated with adverse outcomes. Research about the risk factors for self-harm has informed the field wit..

Promoting Confident body, Confident Child (CBCC) in the Gold Coast community: A mixed methods implementation study

Lyza Norton, Shelley Roberts, Vicki Attenborough, Narelle O'Connor, Laura Hart, Susan Moloney, Francoise Butel