Shraddha Kashyap

Shraddha is currently a PhD candidate and a Provisionally Registered Psychologist completing a Master of Clinical Psychology, at the University of Western Australia. Shraddha’s doctoral study involves the translation of psychological research into clinical practice. Her work in the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia has involved a collaboration with Perth Clinic; a private mental health facility. She found that continuously measuring individuals’ psychological distress during treatment, rather than once at the beginning and once at the end of treatment, can improve precision in predicting adverse health outcomes, such as risk of self-injury. For example, it is often thought that all individuals who report high initial distress would be at the highest risk of self-injury. However, she has published work finding that individuals who report an early improvement in psychological distress are at a lower risk of self-injury despite beginning with high initial distress. This novel approach of continuous monitoring has the potential for more individualized, nuanced and precise risk assessment techniques that extend beyond inpatient mental health facilities and could be used to enhance mental health outcomes more broadly. Shraddha grew up in Kenya, and had lived in Jordan for one year before migrating to Australia with her family in 2002. Prior to commencing her PhD, Shraddha won a scholarship to study in Lille, France, and has since travelled around Europe, South America, North America and Asia.

Shraddha has a keen interest in refugee mental health, and hopes to find meaningful ways of helping displaced peoples begin new lives despite suffering from previous trauma.  The Fulbright Scholarship will allow Shraddha to apply her doctoral research to an asylum seeker and refugee population.  She will investigate resilience among individuals undergoing treatment at the NYU/Bellevue Program for Survivors of Torture.  Specifically, she will examine whether multiple measurements of psychological distress over time can help pinpoint groups of individuals who may improve more rapidly than others, and study factors associated with this resilience.  These factors would include a combination of individual and community characteristics, as well as factors related to their treatment.  Identifying these factors through quantitative and qualitative measurements would allow clinicians to isolate the most helpful aspects of treatment, and improve outcomes for more individuals.