Monica Fooks Memorial Lecture 2025: Building Mental Health Systems for Generation Alpha with Professor Mina Fazel

 

 

 

The Monica Fooks Memorial Lecture was established in 2002 at Somerville College, in memory of Monica, the daughter and sister, respectively, of Jean and Carolyn Fooks, who were both students at Somerville. Monica studied at Edinburgh University and developed bipolar disorder, which led to her taking her own life in September 1994 at the age of 26. Monica’s parents, Geoffrey and Jean Fooks, gave Somerville the funds to set up the lectureship, with the specific aim of improving public awareness of mental illness and to encourage medical students to take more interest in psychiatric illnesses such as bipolar disorder.

 

Mina Fazel is Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Oxford and consultant child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Oxford Children’s Hospital. Her research focuses on improving mental health support for vulnerable and hard-to-reach populations, with a particular interest in school-based supports as well as refugee mental health. She leads the OxWell Student Survey, one of the largest school-based mental health surveys in the UK, which has collected responses from over 100,000 students. She will be sharing recent research and insights from this work, carried out with a committed team of researchers working closely with practitioners and policy-makers, all dedicated to understanding the mental health needs of young people, their help-seeking behaviours, and service preferences.