Rate My Professor Ella Arensman

Professor Ella Arensman is Head of the School of Public Health and Professor of Public Mental Health in the College of Medicine and Health at University College Cork. She earned her MSc and PhD from Leiden University in the Netherlands. As Chief Scientist at the National Suicide Research Foundation, she has over 37 years of experience in public mental health research, focusing on suicide and self-harm surveillance, prevention programs for suicide, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and excess mortality in individuals with mental health conditions. She has initiated numerous national and international interdisciplinary research consortia, including MENTUPP (Mental Health Promotion and Intervention in Occupational Settings), PERMANENS (Towards Personalised Clinical Management of Suicide Risk), PROSPERH (Promoting Positive Mental and Physical Health at Work), MHAINTAIN, and MENTBEST. Professor Arensman has published over 200 peer-reviewed papers, achieving an h-index of 53. Key publications include "Suicide prevention strategies revisited: 10-year systematic review" (Zalsman et al., The Lancet Psychiatry, 2016), "Suicide risk and prevention during the COVID-19 pandemic" (Gunnell et al., The Lancet Psychiatry, 2020), and "Suicide trends in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic" (Pirkis et al., The Lancet Psychiatry, 2021).

Her career includes leadership roles such as past President of the International Association for Suicide Prevention (2013-2017), Vice President of the European Alliance Against Depression, Co-Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Surveillance and Research in Suicide Prevention, and WHO Expert Advisor. She is Visiting Professor at the Australian Institute for Suicide Research and Prevention, Griffith University. Professor Arensman received the Health Research Board Research Leaders Award in 2015 for her program on determinants of self-harm and suicide in Ireland. She has contributed to policy documents including Ireland’s Reach Out (2005-2014) and Connecting for Life (2015-2024) strategies, and WHO’s Suicide Prevention: A Global Imperative (2014) and Live Life (2021). She serves as Co-Editor of CRISIS - The Journal of Crisis Intervention and Suicide Prevention and has supervised 27 PhD theses, enhancing research capacity in the field.