Betty Kitchener

Betty Ann Kitchener (born 1951 ) is an Australian mental health educator who co-founded Mental health first aid training.

Betty Kitchener trained as a teacher, counsellor and nurse.

She is also a mental health consumer advocate, having experienced recurrent major depression.

She has held academic appointments at the Australian National University and the University of Melbourne.

In 2000, she founded Mental health first aid training in Canberra, together with her husband Anthony Jorm, who is a mental health researcher.

Mental health first aid is a 12-hour face-to-face training program for members of the public to learn how to provide initial assistance to someone developing a mental health problem or in a mental health crisis (e.g. they are suicidal).

This program spread across Australia and by 2011 over 170,000 Australian adults had received the training (1% of the country’s adult population).

She held an honorary Adjunct Professorship at Deakin University from 2013 to 2019.

By 2015, this had reached 350,000.

The training has been adapted to various cultural groups in Australia, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, Vietnamese Australians and Chinese Australians.

The training program has spread to many other countries, including Bangladesh, Bermuda, Canada, China, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Japan, Malta, Nepal, Netherlands, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Pakistan, Portugal, Saudi Arabia, Scotland, Singapore, South Africa, Sweden, Switzerland, United Arab Emirates, the United States and Wales.

Until the end of 2016, she was CEO of Mental Health First Aid Australia.

By the end of 2018, 2.6 million persons had been trained in Mental Health First Aid globally.

Kitchener has received many awards and honours for her work on Mental health first aid, including:

Some of her publications are the following: