The Pill Testing Debate

Lecture Overview

In a recent trial at Canberra's 'Groovin the Moo' music festival, 128 participants used a drug-checking service, the first of its kind in Australia. Half of the pills assessed were found to have contained paint, toothpaste and two pills were found be potentially lethal. This session presents the findings of this hotly debated trial and offers you an opportunity to make up your own mind on whether pill testing is an effective harm minimisation tool.

Educators

Karen-Ann Clarke 

Dr Karen-Ann Clarke is a registered nurse and a specialised mental health nurse with 30 years’ experience of working with individuals and families impacted by the experience of mental illness. Using a feminist narrative methodology, her PhD research explored the way that women diagnosed with depression made decisions and meanings about receiving electroconvulsive therapy. As a lecturer in nursing at USC, Karen-Ann is responsible for the coordination of mental health curricula across multiple undergraduate and postgraduate 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 healthcare. Karen-Ann currently supervises a number of honours, masters and PhD 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.