Emeritus Prof Kate Warner, Prof Jill Hunter, A/Prof Carly Schrever, A/Prof Kevin O’Sullivan, Prof Richard Kemp, Prof Kylie Burns, Adj.A/ Prof Terese Henning, Prof Sharyn Roach Anleu, Prof Natalie Skead, Prof Prue Vines
Biography:
Dr Carly Schrever is a lawyer, psychologist, empirical researcher. She has worked in and around the legal profession and the courts for 20 years, focusing specifically on judicial and lawyer wellbeing since 2015. Carly’s doctoral project (University of Melbourne) was Australia’s first empirical and psychologically grounded research into the sources and nature of work-related stress among the Australian judiciary. This research has been published in peer-reviewed journals and textbooks, and the findings presented to judicial audiences globally. Through her psychological consultancy, Human Ethos, she has been engaged by Australian and international jurisdictions to design and deliver tailored judicial wellbeing programs.
Kevin O’Sullivan is clinical psychologist working in Sydney. After completing his training in the UK, he moved to Australia to set up the Violence Prevention Program (now the Violent Offenders Therapeutic Program) for Corrective Services New South Wales. He moved into general practice for some years before returning to NSW Corrections as Director of Offender Programs. He completed his PhD in UNSW Sydney on desistance from crime. For the past twelve years he has worked in general practice, first in the inner city and later in regional NSW. His clinical interests include interpersonal process group work, trauma in judicial officers and non-pathologising Narrative Approaches to therapeutic work. Kevin now teaches life story writing as a way of blending therapeutic insights and narrative process.
Abstract:
This paper examines the presence and impact of traumatic stress on Australian judicial officers, drawing on findings from the recent Australian Judicial Wellbeing Project. This large-scale study relied on survey responses from over 600 state and territory judicial officers, interviews with over 80 judicial officers, a small number of whom also completed 3-day diary studies. Applying the STSS psychometric scale, the findings reveal that over 30% of judicial officers scored in a range warranting formal assessment for PTSD. This concerning finding replicates two earlier Australian studies, the first by Schrever and the second, a New South Wales study, by O’Sullivan et al. We will present additional findings that explore variations in judicial experiences linked to court levels, gender and location. Location variations are revealed between regional and remote courts compared to metropolitan courts and across states and territories. In terms of gender, while there are variations depending on the state or territory, overall women presented with significantly higher STSS scores than men, as did those judicial officers who work in regional and remote courts compared to those in metropolitan courts. The paper will discuss the causes of traumatic stress as identified by the findings. In doing so, it will also compare these 2025 findings with the earlier Schrever study and the UNSW traumatic stress study by O’Sullivan et al. In the latter study three categories of trauma events (vicarious trauma, threats and vilification) were explicitly addressed by survey.