PSYCHOLOGIST IS AUSTRALIA'S GREATEST LIVING GENIUS

Australian psychologist, Dr Dorothy Rowe, has been elected as one of the world's 100 Living Geniuses and the Newcastle-born depression expert is the highest placed Australian on the list.

Creators Synectics, a global consultants firm, chose their geniuses by awarding scores out of 10 to each entrant against a number of factors: paradigm shifting; popular acclaim; intellectual power; achievement and cultural importance. Dr Rowe is placed in 72^nd position in a list headed by Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.

Dr Rowe owes her status as a living genius to her radical work on depression, which she started studying long before it was recognized as a global health issue. Her ground-breaking book "Depression: The Way out of your Prison" was the first competent handbook to provide guidance on how to escape the prison of depression. She showed that drugs cannot be the sole solution to depression. Her work now encompasses a wide range of social and psychological issues and how to resolve them. Most recently she has tackled the issue of siblings. Her book 'My Dearest Enemy, My Dangerous Friend' presents a radically new way of thinking about siblings that unites the many apparently contradictory aspects of these complex relationships.

"It is a tremendous honour to be placed amongst such an outstanding group of people who have had such a profound effect on the world," says Dorothy Rowe. "It also represents a clear recognition of the much wider understanding of the importance of psychological issues, how we interpret the world and how this, in turn affects our ability to change things for good - or bad. These range from the enormous health challenge depression presents the world, through to how we understand the challenges of global warming and the changes we must all make to deal with it."

Dorothy Rowe was born in Newcastle and educated at Sydney University before working as an education psychologist in Sydney. She moved to the UK and after gaining her PhD, joined the National Health Service, where she researched and wrote her first book, 'Choosing, Not Losing'. She left the Health Service in 1986 to concentrate on writing and now divides her time between London and Sydney.

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(Australian Press Release: Oct 30th 07)