Karen-ann Clarke RN, PhD

Dr. Karen-Ann Clarke is a Registered Nurse and a specialized mental health nurse, with 30 years’ experience of working with individuals and families impacted by the experiences of mental illness. Using a feminist narrative methodology, her Ph.D. research explored the way in which women diagnosed with depression made decisions and meanings about receiving electroconvulsive therapy. As a lecturer in nursing at USC, Dr. Clarke is responsible for the coordination of mental health curricula across multiple undergraduate and post-graduate programs.

Teaching in excess of 900 undergraduate students each year, she is passionate about the value that immersive mental health simulation can bring to student’s learning and clinical skills, and the way that it can safely bring to life theoretical concepts related to mental health care. Dr. Clarke currently supervises a number of honors, masters, and Ph.D. students and is part of numerous research projects involving visualisation and simulation, mental illness, suicide prevention and the inclusion of people with lived experience of mental illness into the teaching and learning space.