Overview
Dr Kay Wilson, Melbourne Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Melbourne Law School, is a lawyer, scholar, and writer with an interest in mental health, disability, and human rights law. She has a Bachelor of Arts and Laws and an Honours Degree in Psychology from Monash University and a PhD in law from the University of Melbourne.
She is the author of Mental Health Law: Abolish or Reform? (OUP, 2021) and is published in law and psychology in various book chapters and Australian and international peer-reviewed journals including International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, Human Rights Law Review, Medical Law Review, Psychology, Psychiatry and Law and Personality and Individual Differences. She is also coordinating editor of an edited collection in honour of Emeritus Professor Bernadette McSherry entitled The Future of Mental Health Law (Routledge, forthcoming).
Kay is the course coordinator for the NDIS and Disability Benefits Law Clinic at Melbourne Law School. During her PhD she was also a Teaching Fellow for the Human Rights and Global Justice breadth subject.
Prior to getting her PhD, Kay was a researcher on Emeritus Professor Bernadette McSherry’s Rethinking Mental Health Laws and Seclusion and Restraint Projects. In 2015, she won the Dontas Travelling Fellowship to Greece to give a paper on seclusion and restraint and in 2016 she obtained a travelling fellowship to the Transnational Law Summer Institute at King’s College in London. Before moving into academia she practiced law at one of Australia’s leading commercial law firms in dispute resolution and as a corporate lawyer at a statutory corporation in the energy sector where she learnt a lot about corporate governance, company secretarial work and regulatory compliance.
Her new exciting interdisciplinary fellowship project is entitled “Mental Health and Public Health: Thinking About Law as Medicine.”