Dr Elizabeth Stratton

Dr Elizabeth Stratton is a postdoctoral researcher with The University of Sydney. Her body of work has focused on the stigma, discrimination and disability of mental health in the workplace and, importantly, developing and evaluating ways to tackle this.

Elizabeth developed a world first web-based decision aid tool to assist employees in deciding if and how they should disclose their mental health problem or not. The rationale behind this research was the complexity of disclosure decision-making, and the identification of several barriers to disclosure. The program, called “READY?” was evaluated in a randomised controlled trial (RCT) trial where it was shown to be more effective in terms of disclosure and improving people’s mental health than the online disclosure and discrimination information provided by Australia’s leading mental health charity. Those using READY? experienced an improvement in depressive symptoms and reported greater decision confidence. ONLY participants who used READY? subsequently disclosed their condition, and the 25% who did disclose experienced even greater mental health benefits.

As an end-user focussed researcher, she has partnered with the NSW government’s Mentally Healthy Workplace program to bring READY? to scale and make it freely available to 100,000’s of workers. The early phases of her ECR carer are focussed on evaluating the uptake and real-world impact of this in mental health and wellbeing.

Additionally, she has developed strong evidence synthesis skills leading to several published systematic reviews of mental health and wellbeing interventions.