Beverley Raphael

Beverley Raphael (4 October 1934 – 21 September 2018) was an Australian psychiatrist and academic. She was the first woman to be appointed professor of psychiatry in Australia.

Early life and education Beverley Raphael was born in Casino, New South Wales on 4 October 1934. She attended Casino High School and in the Leaving Certificate was second in the State in physics and chemistry. While studying medicine at the University of Sydney she was a resident of the Women's College from 1952 to 1957. described by leading Australian psychiatrist Patrick McGorry as a "landmark study of widows and bereavement".

Career Raphael began her career as a general practitioner, working in Manly and Tasmania, before specialising in psychiatry.

In the aftermath of the Granville rail disaster in 1977, Raphael led the mental health follow up. She was skilled in alleviating stress and trauma following other disasters such as the Ash Wednesday bushfires (1983), the Newcastle earthquake (1989), the Bali bombings (2002) and the South East Asian tsunami (2004). She was elected a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia in 1986. In 1994 she was awarded a Top Ten Australian Achievers Australia Day award in recognition of her contribution to the field of mental health. She was awarded an honorary Doctor of Medicine by the University of Newcastle in 2002 and received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies in 2004.

The RANZCP has awarded the Beverley Raphael New Investigator Grant to support post-doctoral research since 2014. The Australian National University has administered the RANZCP Beverley Raphael Prize for Psychiatry, requiring 'Higher Level Performance' results in a Scientific Essay on Psychiatry, named in her honour and awarded to the "most outstanding final-year medical student in psychiatry".

Selected works

The anatomy of bereavement: a handbook for the caring professions (1983) When disaster strikes: how individuals and communities cope with disaster (1986)