Patrick McGorry’s Orygen has massive grant to help the young

A $33m grant will further empower Orygen’s mission to tackle the insidious psychosis that afflicts the young.

Orygen youth mental heath agency executive director Professor Patrick McGorry.

Youth mental health organisation Orygen has won a $33m research grant aimed at predicting, treating and ultimately preventing the progression of psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia in at-risk young people.

It is believed to be the largest competitive grant awarded to Australian-led medical research by US agency National Institutes of Health, for a project called ­Trajectories and predictors in the clinical high risk for psychosis population: Australian network of clinics and international partners.

“The grant will enable Orygen to pave the way for novel and personalised treatment, and greatly improved outcomes, for a group of young people who have often been neglected by society,” ­Orygen’s executive director ­Patrick McGorry, an eminent psychiatrist and former Australian of the Year, said.

Professor McGorry said psychosis, especially schizophrenia, was often called the abandoned illness, because it had not been taken seriously by society. “These illnesses typically cause severe and hidden suffering, a very high level of disability, lost potential and premature death.”

Early intervention was difficult because while it was clear young people needed help, it was hard to work out the right type of care because of a lack of knowledge of how their condition might develop. “Predicting that future — what kind of mental illness a young person is in the process of developing, or indeed if it’s just a transient, self-limiting thing — is very important for treatment and care,” he said.

Project leader Barnaby Nelson said his team would be recruiting a large sample of young people at high risk of developing psychosis and assessing them through clinical interviews, brain imaging, genetics and neurocognitive and neurophysiological assessments.

“Once this large cohort is ­established, we’ll be able to test out the prediction models that already exist in the field and, more importantly, develop new, more robust prediction models,” Professor Nelson said. They would compare across clinical settings internationally and in different samples of young people.

Orygen won the five-year grant in partnership with the ­University of Melbourne’s Centre for Youth Mental Health. It will work with partners in Australia, Europe and Asia and collaborate with a parallel US consortium at Yale and Harvard universities.