Rate My Professor Tess Patterson

Tess Patterson is an Associate Professor and Head of the Department of Psychological Medicine (Dunedin) in the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Otago. She holds a BA, PGDipArts, and PhD from the University of Otago, as well as a Postgraduate Diploma in Clinical Psychology. Registered as a clinical psychologist with the New Zealand Psychologists Board, she is a member of the New Zealand College of Clinical Psychologists. She serves as Vice-Chair and founding Trustee of the Male Survivors of Sexual Abuse Trust - Otago. Since 2010, she has worked as a specialist clinical psychologist assessing and treating adolescents and adults who have sexually harmed or offended. In this role, she advises legal practitioners, courts, Corrections, Oranga Tamariki social workers, teachers, psychologists, and psychiatrists, acts as a court witness, and conducts comprehensive risk assessments. She is an ACC-registered health provider whose clinical practice mirrors her research in sexual abuse and offending.

Academically, Patterson convenes the ELM2 course, teaches second- through fifth-year medical students, provides cognitive behavioural therapy training for registrar programmes, and supervises Masters and PhD research students. Her research interests include clinical investigations into sexual abuse, sexual offending, forensic interviewing, and alcohol and drug disorders, spanning childhood sexual abuse impacts and treatments, developmental pathways to adolescent harmful sexual behaviour including gender differences in offending, and evaluations of alcohol and drug treatment outcomes. Key publications comprise recent works such as "Seeking support: The voice of young men who have experienced sexual harm during their life course" (2026, Journal of Interpersonal Violence), "Typologies of women who have sexually offended" (2025, Psychiatry, Psychology & Law), "Characteristics of harmful sexual behaviour in autistic adolescent males" (2025, Psychiatry, Psychology & Law), "Sexual assault in older-age adults" (2025, Journal of Aging & Social Policy), and highly cited articles including "App-based mindfulness meditation for psychological distress" (2020, Psychology & Health, 132 citations) and "Drawing helps children to talk about their presenting problems" (2015, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 105 citations). Her body of work has received over 1,081 citations on Google Scholar.