Rob Whitley
Professor
PhD
Recovery, Stigma, Men’s Mental Health, Veterans’ Mental Health, Qualitative Methods, Participatory Video, Religion and Mental Health, Suicide Prevention.
Rob Whitley is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry (㽶Ƶ) and a researcher at the Douglas Research Centre. He is also a Fonds de recherche du Québec-Santé Distinguished Research Scholar and an Honorary Principal Fellow at the University of Melbourne.
He is particularly interested in research that can help promote recovery, reduce stigma, and prevent suicide. He has published over 150 academic papers on these topics, and he is the author of several books including (Springer, 2021) and (Robert Laffont, 2024).
Whitley is the founding director of , a well-established collective of videographers with lived experience of mental illness. RADAR has created documentaries and videos for a variety of different organizations on topics including suicide prevention, stigma reduction, and mental health recovery promotion. Additionally, Whitley has written over 100 mental health-related articles for lay audiences in national and international media including the Globe & Mail, the National Post, and La Presse.
He has also collaborated with parliamentarians from diverse countries including Canada, Spain, and the UK to help develop mental health policy. He has given expert testimony to Committees of the Canadian Senate and the UK House of Commons and has presented his research at the European Parliament. In 2022, he was awarded the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee Medallion for “service to Canada”.
Whitley has a special interest in research that can be used to improve mental health in the Caribbean and Latin America. Indeed, he has successfully collaborated with researchers in Jamaica, Chile, and Mexico to advance understanding in those jurisdictions. To this end, his new book (Psimatica, 2024) was recently released in Spanish.
Whitley is open to the supervision of students, who should send him a letter of inquiry, CV, and university transcript(s).