DrLindsay Dewa

Lindsay is an Advanced Research Fellow in Mental Health, and President's Medal winner for Excellence in Societal Engagement within the School of Public Health. She is also an Honorary Research Psychologist at West London NHS Trust. Lindsay works across the clinical and public mental health interface, using participatory and mixed methods approaches to investigate the acceptability, development, evaluation, and implementation of digital technologies to support better mental health in young people. Her work primarily focuses on preventing and detecting youth mental health deterioration using digital devices and lifestyle factors (e.g., sleep and social connection). She is deeply committed to co-producing research and its outputs with young people to ensure her work is accessible to their peers. Other work centres on suicide prevention, self-harm and care transitions in vulnerable and seldom-heard groups. She is also an Imperial Mental Health Research Network steering group original member, and member of IGHI's mental health and wellbeing, and Royal College of Psychiatrists Young Adult Mental Health working groups.

Co-production in mental health

Lindsay's work embeds co-production and/or meaningful patient and public involvement (PPI). This usually means working together with people with lived experience of mental health difficulties throughout the research process - from prioritisation and design to dissemination, and evaluation. Her latest work is co-produced with young people with experience of mental health difficulties and waiting for mental health treatment to co-design a new digital intervention to help support them while waiting. She also examined the impact of COVID-19 lockdown on the mental health and coping strategies of young people which is co-produced with young people with experience of mental health difficulties. She also published a co-produced qualitative systematic review on this topic.

Public engagement

Lindsay won the prestigious and competitive President's Medal for Excellence in Societal Engagement in 2023. She was sought out by InnerEye Productions because of her innovative co-produced approach to mental health research and engagement to co-produce a film drama focused on inequalities and young people's mental health during the pandemic (NEXUS). NEXUS is an award-winning film that has been recognised by the British Film Institute and archived - meaning it will be available for everyone to view forever. In 2023, NEXUS won the Royal College of Psychiatrists' Psychiatric Communicator of the Year award, won gold in the Clarion EVCOM Health and Wellbeing category, shortlisted for the highly competitive HSJ Awards for NHS Communications Initiative of the Year (1 or 223 shortlisted, from 1456 entries) and highly commended in the Health Equity Awards. Lindsay also led an "on the road" showcase screening NEXUS across London, Birmingham, Manchester and Middlesbrough all areas that had a connection to the young people she worked with on NEXUS.

Lindsay is actively involved in public engagement projects that feature her work, including Imperial Lates, Imperial Instagram Live, IGHI blogs, Podcasts, and Imperial's Great Exhibition Road Festival. Her work has also been recognised by local artists in Imperial as part of Great Exhibition Road Festival. She also won funding by The National Lottery Fund to increase awareness in young men's mental health through creative media (Fightin' Thru). She also created a new innovative mini magazine to showcase research findings on mental health in a more accessible way for young people called Future Minds. She also led the Pint of Science 2019 Beautiful Minds session.

Teaching

She was Topic Lead in Mental Health and Wellbeing for the Lifestyle Medicine and Prevention module for MBBS at Imperial 2019-2022. She lectures across BSc Neuroscience and Mental Health, MSc Health Policy and MSc Patient Safety courses, and supervises students across MSc Health Policy, MSC Design, BSc Neuroscience and Mental Health and MSc Public Health. She supervises PhD students focused on integrated care in mental health, mental health inequalities and AI-informed digital behavioural interventions to support adolescents' mental health in schools.

Background and experience

Lindsay's background is in psychology (BA, MSc) and forensic psychology (MSc). During her PhD, titled: Insomnia in a prison population: a mixed methods study, she studied the prevalence and associated factors of insomnia including depression, suicidality and anxiety in a large cohort of male and female prisoners at The University of Manchester. She subsequently designed and tested a novel treatment pathway for insomnia for prisoners in a high-secure prison in England after winning a Health Foundation Innovating for Improvement Award. She has over 15 years research experience that spans public health, psychology and forensic mental health.