After all, it was her parents who set her on the path to becoming a renowned professor of psychiatry at the University of Melbourne and research director at Orygen Youth Health.

Their influence was more than a little responsible for her interest in working with marginalised and vulnerable groups – including homeless people, prisoners, and children living in care.

"My father was a prisoner of war in Asia during the Second World War," Herrman says. "He was captured on his 24th birthday in Singapore."

In total her father spent 3½years in Changi prison, and initially her mother did not know if he had survived. A Red Cross tape recording made inside the camps was the only time she heard his voice, and a few telegrams later offered fleeting indirect contact.

Helen Herrman was born after the war. She knew nothing of that upheaval – just that her father could be irritable at times. And that he refused to eat rice. He was steady in life but affected nonetheless. Sometimes she would wake up and find him sitting in a chair, not having gone to bed.

He didn't talk about his experiences until late in life, she says, and even then only sparingly.

"He said it was only by sticking together – and people working together – that they survived. The other thing he said was, 'Whatever you say you're going to do, make sure you do it'. Those were defining words for me."

Her mother passed on her own brand of determination and kindness – as a strong presence in difficult conditions – someone who always had a meal cooking on the stove after school. ("I think I was very fortunate in having the kind of life that I had," she says.)

We meet at her home on a leafy street in Kew – a beautiful space with little art deco finishes, covered in photographs of her children, cards from grandchildren and trinkets from travels around the world. In fact she has only just returned from a mini-break in Lisbon with her husband, a physician and addiction specialist, following the World Psychiatric Association conference in Madrid, where she was elected president.

She will assume that mantle in 2017 – as head of an umbrella organisation representing 140 psychiatric associations in 120 countries around the globe – and will serve as president-elect until that time.

It seems an eon ago that Herrman was a keen young high school biology student, encouraged by her progressive parents to study pursue science. "Home economics was the norm at the time," she says. "I was a bit rebellious, and decided to do chemistry."

On weekends and holidays her father taught her physics and higher mathematics – "I can still remember sitting with him and going through his old textbooks" – so that she could follow her instincts and study medicine.

She began at the University of Sydney, where her family was living at the time, but finished at Monash University after they moved south, as one of perhaps 10 women in a class of 120.

"Now it's 50 to 60 per cent women," she says. "A dramatic change and a good one."

She did research in immunology and a residency in obstetrics. But it was during an early position in Britain – working as a trainee public health physician based in Oxford – that she began to fixate on the idea of social factors as closely related to mental health: a notion that remained central to her later interests and actions in psychiatry.

"This is the idea that people who live in poverty and disadvantage are more likely to have ill health," she says. "That experiences in families are formative."

Not only that, but the notion that social factors can be influenced by policy – whether the taxation applied to cigarettes or through laws around serving alcohol. "How friendly can we make surroundings and outdoor settings for older people?" she asks. "There are all sorts of things we can do at a population level that influence the kind of environment people live in and their overall health, including mental health."

While she was a graduate student at Oxford, Herrman also met her first husband – the late Professor Irwin Herrman, a New Yorker and Dartmouth College alumnus trained as a historian and educator. They had two sons together in six years abroad, and when they returned to Melbourne in 1980 established a life together.

He was devoted to education in the western suburbs, most recently as director of the Footscray Institute of Technology, but died in 1992 after a short illness from a brain tumour. She decided to train in psychiatry and began by examining how people living with depression and psychosis are twice as a likely to die young as other people in the community.

In one study, she looked at the experience of early death and hospital admission in people with a diagnosis of schizophrenia. In the asylum setting, she says, people with this diagnosis often died from tuberculosis, pneumonia and even malnutrition. But in the era of community care, there were more deaths from accidents, suicides and heart disease.

"The rate of early death was about the same for the big asylums as for people when they moved out into the community," Herrman says, "but the reasons for early death were very different, which suggests the reason was not biological."

Professional care is at the core of Herrman's professional interests, including a specific focus on young people who are taken away from their homes because of abuse or neglect, and end up in foster care or kinship care or residential care. She is drawn to examining the stress, disadvantage and trauma of their existence, and how we succeed or fail in helping organisations (such as Anglicare and the Salvation Army) and individuals responsible for day-to-day support.

"They do a great job. But as a community we allocate very meagre resources relative to the size of the problems these children have," she says. "This is parenting with the least resources for the most troubled – in the most difficult situations."

Girls, she believes, are a particularly vulnerable group. Young women will be a major focus of her WPA presidency – particularly before, during and after pregnancy. The potential "failure to thrive" of young people born to mothers with depression is a real issue.

"And the prevalence of violence against young women in the community is quite high, sadly," she says. "Young women from disadvantaged and difficult backgrounds also tend to have children more early, and a cycle of intergenerational trauma continues."

Herrman has also taken an interest in new areas of psychiatry – such as the positive and negative impact of technology on young people's mental health, whether in the latter case from financial and sexual abuse or cyberbullying, as well as addiction to digital media.

"There are certainly extremes," she says. "If you go into north Asia – especially Japan and Korea, people are very worried about the overuse of the internet among young people." On the other hand there are promising approaches to using technology to promote mental health and prevent suicide.

Herrman began working in Asia in 2000, when she took on a role with the World Health Organisation as a regional adviser for mental health, visiting everywhere from China to Malaysia, Korea, Samoa and Japan. She was involved in the early stages of re-establishing mental health services in Cambodia, where there simply were no psychiatrists after the genocide and displacement of the Pol Pot regime.

From there she took an interest in the World Psychiatric Association. She networked, got along well with people, and was elected secretary for publications in 2005.

Standing for president takes significantly more political effort: everything from setting up a website to writing letters and organising meetings. She ran for the top job in 2011 and lost a close contest after some bad luck – when delegates who would have voted her way left the conference early.

Her good friend, psychiatrist and 2010 Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry, describes her defeat as like "losing the grand final by a point".

She decided to try again, "partly because of a streak of determination", partly because she had "the opportunity, interest and energy" – but also because of support among women.

Herrman is not the first female president of the organisation, but she is the first in three decades – and she has been the only woman on the eight-member executive committee over a 12-year period. Such disparity is not reflected in the profession, which is more equally split.

The election took place in September, at the World Conference of Psychiatry, a triennial event this year held in Spain. She was accompanied by her husband, Professor Greg Whelan, whom she met at St Vincent's Health and married 20 years ago.

Delegates from member societies in 120 countries were there, casting votes weighted according to the size of their member group: 1100 in total.

There were two other candidates Herrman was competing with throughout the four-day congress of scientific paper presentations and gladhanding in halls and canopied courtyards. Herrman had lists and plans and advice before an electronic voting process that takes place over a three-hour pandemonic period one afternoon.

("You can imagine the state of nerves. They were saying it was too close to call," she says. "In the end I got 55 per cent of the vote. It's a number you don't forget.")

Herrman has seen how good mental health can be promoted and some help for ill people achieved even in countries with little funding, such as India, where schemes that make use of one psychiatrist for 1 million people can work by enlisting, training and setting up supervision for primary health services, volunteers and lay workers to provide basic treatment.

Herrman believes enormous gains can be made in this way – working with the right individuals in WHO and UN groups – a belief reminiscent of the Margaret Mead quote she has posted on her presidential campaign webpage: Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed people can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

"We can't do anything alone," she says. "The profession needs to work with service users, community groups, family groups – a range of people in a range of places."

There are more than 70 scientific sections in the WPA from which they can develop new projects and publications.

"We can draw together evidence and then work with partners to disseminate it," she says. "One of the biggest problems we've got in healthcare is making sure knowledge is used and shared and plays a part in policy."

As much as her position is global, the same approach will be needed locally, where the development of community mental health resources has declined.

"There's still a lot of stigma and misunderstanding, and we don't get the correct resources allocated because of a lack of political will."

A key goal of hers is to see psychiatry elevated to achieve its central, integral place in healthcare – but do so with a co-operative and inclusive approach that involves (and empowers) patients, families and ground-level workers.

She believes we have not yet recovered from the days when mentally ill people were once alienated from society and locked in asylums.

"We still haven't come back from that – we've still got a long way to go," she says. "It's a question of achieving human rights."

Dr Helen Herrman

-  President-elect of the World Psychiatric Association

-  Director of research at Orygen, The National Centre of Excellence in Youth Mental Health

-  Professor of psychiatry, The University of Melbourne

-  Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre in Mental Health in Melbourne

-  Honorary consultant psychiatrist at St Vincent's Health

-  President of the Pacific Rim College of Psychiatrists

-  Vice-president of the International Association of Women's Mental Health

-  Former director of psychiatry at St Vincent's Health

-  Author of more than 200 peer-reviewed papers

-  Editor of eight books and 23 monographs