A prestigious award has been announced for Glendon College Psychologist and Professor Gerald Young.
The Traumatic Stress Section of the Canadian Psychological Association (CPA) has accepted and approved Young’s nomination for its Lifetime Achievement Award – the highest level of achievement in the field.
Young will accept the award in Victoria, B.C., during the CPA conference running from June 9 to 11, 2016. He will also be featured as a guest speaker at the event.
His nomination comes after a dedicated career in the field, and follows an announcement earlier this year naming him an American Psychological Association Fellow.
Among Young’s many career highlights, he spearheaded the journal Psychological Injury and Law (springer.com) in 2008. He is also an organizer behind a Psychological Injury and Law conference that took place earlier this year, and he has, in the past, presented at continuing education workshops that run during the American Psychological Association conventions.
Young also organized a panel this summer for another conference in Vienna for the International Academy of Law & Mental Health.
“Psychological injury and law is a challenging yet rapidly growing field of academic inquiry and forensic practice that is marked by a significant adversarial divide,” says Izabela Z. Schultz, psychology professor at the University of British Columbia. “Dr. Young’s most outstanding contribution has been to develop a scientifically and professionally balanced approach to a journal in which board members and publications attempt to be fair, evidence-informed and educational.”
Further to these contributions to the field, Young has also published several books on the topic, including one on malingering in 2014. Currently, he is working on a teaching text on psychological injury and law and a book on causes and determinants of behaviour. His most recent journal articles are on post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) (2014), the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition (DSM-5) (2013) and mental health law and policy (2014).
“Dr. Young is an internationally renowned scholar and a highly respected leader in this new emerging field – an innovator who has been instrumental in putting it together, and a role model for all of us,” says Schultz. “His legacy will be a foundational knowledge published in various journals and books, aside from his many talks and shared ideas that will influence the field for years and decades to come.”