About the Lab

The School Mental Health Lab is an applied research group led by Tyler Renshaw, PhD. The lab’s mission is to improve the quality and reach of mental health services in schools.

The lab is located in the Psychology Department at Utah State University and powered by a small but brilliant team of PhD students. This website is the lab's online home. And it is also Dr. Renshaw's blog, which is why posts and pages are written by him in the the first-person.

Now, I'm switching to the first-person voice.

The lab’s mission is to improve the quality and reach of mental health services in schools. We develop and evaluate evidence-based practices that can be used in schools to promote mental health equity. We also investigate the relationships among mental health variables and school experiences, so we can understand how to build better theory and practices for school mental health work.

The lab thinks about mixing mental health services and schools a little differently than most people might. Here are 5 big ideas driving our work:

  1. Schools should be community hubs for providing free mental health services.
  2. Mental health services in schools should be adapted to align with community values and cultural strengths.
  3. Mental health services in schools should be appropriately scaled to be sustainable with local resources.
  4. Mental health services in schools should focus as much on prevention and risk as on treatment and disorders.
  5. Mental health services in schools should balance reducing ill-being and solving problems with promoting well-being and building assets.

The lab is broadly interested in all levels and kinds of mental health services in schools. You could say we are intellectually omnivorous. Yet our work also has some themes. At the level of practices, we tend to focus on universal and targeted prevention, especially screening and classroom-based supports. And at the level of constructs, we work a lot with mindfulness, subjective well-being, and internalizing problems.

You can learn more about our lab's research by clicking through Dr. Renshaw's Google Scholar profile and checking out the posts on our studies. You can learn more about the people in the lab by checking out Dr. Renshaw's bio page, the PhD students page, the PhD alums page, and the collaborators page [coming soon].

Interested in joining our lab? See our prospective students FAQ page and our prospective RAs page. 

Want to collaborate or connect on a project? Just send me an email. 

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