【LECTURE】 How to ask about self-harm: lessons from the OxWell Student Survey
SPEAKER: Professor Mina Fazel
Professor (Chair) of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, University of Oxford
SPEAKER: Dr Emma Soneson
Senior Postdoctoral Reseacher, Department of Psychiatry, University of Oxford
TALK TITLE:
“How to ask about self-harm: lessons from the OxWell Student Survey
Collecting sensitive data from adolescents: methodological considerations
HOST: Runsen Chen
Associate Professor, Vanke School of Public Health, Tsinghua University
TIME: 15:00–17:00, Thursday, Mar 12th, 2026
VENUE: Lecture Hall, 1st Floor, Jinchun Yuan Building, Tsinghua University
BIOGRAPHY
Professor Mina Fazel is a leading UK child and adolescent psychiatrist and serves as the Chair of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in University of Oxford. Her scholarship and clinical leadership centre on improving access to high-quality, effective mental health care for children and young people, with particular emphasis on strengthening school-based mental health systems, advancing the real-world implementation of youth interventions, and developing trauma-informed support for children from refugee and migrant backgrounds.
Professor Fazel trained in medicine and social anthropology at the University of Cambridge and completed her clinical and specialty training at the University of Oxford. She leads Team Intervene, which focuses on identifying and addressing key ethical, organisational, and system-level barriers that shape adolescents’ pathways to care—including issues related to consent, privacy, and parent involvement—and on developing scalable, implementable intervention strategies. Since 2019, her team has advanced the OxWell Student Survey, generating large-scale student data to characterise mental health needs and service preferences, thereby informing school practice as well as policy and resource allocation by local authorities.
At the international level, Professor Fazel has led the Wellcome Trust programme MindKind, which addresses emerging priorities in youth data governance and the development of mental health data platforms, advocating for trustworthy and sustainable global mental health data infrastructure. She has also made substantial contributions to the field of refugee child and adolescent mental health, examining the effects of cumulative adversity, the psychological consequences of immigration detention, and the effectiveness and implementation of trauma-focused approaches such as Narrative Exposure Therapy for refugee adolescents. Professor Fazel has published over 200 articles in leading journals, including The Lancet, BMJ, The Lancet Psychiatry, and The Lancet Child & Adolescent Health.
In addition to her academic role, Professor Fazel is a Consultant Child and Adolescent Psychiatrist at Oxford Children’s Hospital, supporting the translation of evidence-based interventions into routine care. By integrating rigorous epidemiological evidence, school-system implementation frameworks, and robust ethical governance, her work provides an internationally influential research and practice paradigm for building scalable, equitable youth mental health services.
Dr Emma Soneson is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Oxford Department of Psychiatry, specialising in child and adolescent mental health. Her research interests span psychiatric epidemiology to intervention development and evaluation. She has particular expertise in public health approaches, mental health services and support, the mental health needs of marginalised and minoritised populations, and the role of schools in mental health promotion and prevention. Dr Soneson completed her PhD in Psychiatry at the University of Cambridge, for which she was awarded the Cambridge Clinical School's Milo Keynes Prize for Outstanding Dissertation and the Bill Gates Sr. Prize. She also holds an MPhil in Public Health from the University of Cambridge.
