Speaker Bio – May 14 meeting of the Committee on Prevention of Mental Disorders and Substance Abuse Among Children, Youth, and Young Adults

Patricia J. Mrazek obtained her M.S.W. in social work from Smith College and her Ph.D. in family development from Union Graduate School. She was a Sheldon Fellow in the Advanced Family Therapy Program at the Tavistock Clinic in London, England. For many years she worked with C. Henry Kempe as the Assistant Director of the National Center for the Prevention and Treatment of Child Abuse and Neglect at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center. Following another year abroad in England, she worked on an asthma prevention research study at National Jewish Hospital in Denver. After a move to Bethesda, Maryland, she became a Senior Program Officer and Study Director in The Institute of Medicine’s Division of Biobehavioral Sciences and Mental Disorders where she worked on projects in prevention of mental disorders, HIV/ AIDS prevention, depression in primary care, social marketing to adolescents, and family violence. While continuing at IOM in dissemination of the 1994 prevention report, she became the Executive Director of the Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research in Washington, D.C. For the last decade she has been a mental health policy consultant and writer, specializing in prevention. She has worked with the World Federation for Mental Health, the Society for Prevention Research, the National Mental Health Association, the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry, the Center for Mental Health Services, Prevention Technologies, LLC, Magellan Behavioral Health, and the Mid-Valley Health Care Network. She was a writer on prevention science and services for the Surgeon General’s Report on Mental Health and for the Subcommittee on Children and Families of the President’s New Freedom Commission on Mental Health. She has continued to write with her prevention colleagues on community monitoring systems, and on expanding mental health clinical practices to include prevention. Since 2005, she and her husband, David Mrazek, M.D., have written chapters on prevention of psychiatric disorders in children and adolescents for the major U.S. psychiatry texts.