In Conversation With… Associate Professor Shuichi Suetani and Emeritus Professor Sid Bloch

Sidney Bloch AM is Emeritus Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and Honorary Senior Psychiatrist at St Vincent’s Hospital, Melbourne. He is a Fellow of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP). He spent three years at Stanford University on a Harkness Fellowship after being awarded a PhD at the University of Melbourne.

He was awarded a Citation by the RANZCP for his academic contribution to psychiatry and an award for medical research by the Bethlehem Griffiths Research Foundation, both in 2004. He was chief editor of the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry for 13 years, the longest tenure in the history of the Journal; and prior to that, Associate Editor of the British Journal of Psychiatry for 10 years. He has had Visiting Professorships in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the University of Hong Kong, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and Columbia University.

Sid has published 14 books, several of which have been brought out in new editions and/or have been translated, and over 200 articles and chapters, chiefly in the areas of psychotherapy, psycho-oncology and psychiatric ethics.

His main research interests are in psycho-oncology, namely family grief in the wake of a death from cancer; application of psychological therapies for women with early and late stage breast cancer; families facing the loss of a parent from cancer; couples in which the man has localised prostate cancer and the experience of having prostate cancer in patients and their partners; and ethics including ethical theory, codes of ethics, psychiatric ethics, history of psychiatric ethics.

He has taught medical students and psychiatric trainees throughout his career, paying special attention to bridging the sciences and the humanities in medicine generally and psychiatry in particular, including the visual arts, literature, theatre, film and music. He established a new innovative course, Empathic/Ethical Practice, in the University of Melbourne medical school, which incorporates many of the arts, especially poetry, short stories and film and has become a core feature of the curriculum.

Associate Professor Shuichi Suetani is a community psychiatrist in Queensland. He currently works for the Institute for Urban Indigenous Health in Brisbane. Alongside his psychiatry training, Shuichi completed a PhD exploring the epidemiological relationships between physical activity and mental disorders. He has also obtained the Australasian Society of Lifestyle Medicine Fellowship. Shuichi also sits on the editorial board for Therapeutic Advances in Psychopharmacology and is deputy editor for Australasian Psychiatry.