ABOUT US
Dr. Emily Fawcett
Dr. Fawcett is from Centreville, Nova Scotia. She completed her B.Sc. (Hons) in Psychology at Acadia University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ontario. She completed the Doctoral Professional Psychology Residency Program at Memorial University’s Student Wellness and Counselling Centre (SWCC), and in the fall of 2016, was hired at the SWCC as an Assistant Professor in Counselling. As a faculty member at the SWCC she led psychotherapy training for psychiatry residents within Memorial University’s Faculty of Medicine was involved in teaching and supervising psychology residents as part of the SWCC’s Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) accredited residency program, and provided individual and group therapy to registered students at Memorial University as a registered Psychologist. In 2023, Dr. Fawcett transferred to the Psychology Department and is now an Associate Professor of Psychology at Memorial University of Newfoundland.
Clinical Epidemiology Importance
Clinical epidemiology provides an avenue for improving prevention, screening, diagnosis, prognosis, and even the treatment of disease (University of Toronto, Institute of Health Policy, Management and Evaluation, 2023). For instance, a call for greater perinatal anxiety screening (as opposed to the default postpartum depression screening) followed Fawcett et al.’s meta-analytic (2019) finding that the prevalence of having at least one anxiety disorder in pregnancy and the postpartum period was significantly higher than originally thought at nearly 20%. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses are common tools in clinical epidemiology and can be instrumental in resolving inconsistencies in past research findings and deriving firmer conclusions. For instance, Fawcett et al. (2020) settled past debate, showing a consistent gender difference in the worldwide prevalence of OCD, with women at 1.6 times greater risk than men.
Mental Health Awareness
The AWE lab also aims to de-stigmatize mental health conditions and shine greater awareness on mental health disparities and lesser-known or unusual presentations of anxiety and related disorders that are often stigmatized or misunderstood. For instance, recent research in the lab has examined the ability of clinicians, students, and the lay public to identify lesser-known presentations of OCD (e.g., Harm OCD, Relationship OCD), and factors that affect stigma directed towards these conditions (e.g., gender, symptom presentation).
Future research interests include examining the prevalence of more obscure or unusual manifestations of OCD, the ability of clinicians and the general public to identify these conditions, the risk of clinical misdiagnosis, and factors that help de-stigmatize these mental health conditions.