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About Us

Our Mission

The ultimate mission of the PRIDE iM Lab is to contribute to eliminating mental health disparities and mental health service inequities among LGBTQ+ adolescents and young people. To work towards this mission, we strive to 1) cultivate meaningful community engagement, both locally in the Pittsburgh, PA area and regionally/nationally 2) build scientific evidence on social media–based individual, interpersonal, community, and system-level factors that shape mental health outcomes of queer youth and other marginalized groups and 3) develop interventions that might improve said outcomes.  

Click on the accordions below to learn about our research focus, guiding principles, and values. 

Research Focus

Our studies have a two-fold focus:  

  1. We seek to understand whether and to what extent social media interactions and experiences –both positive and negative– influence mental health (i.e., depression, anxiety, suicide risk) among LGBTQ+ teens and young people.  

  2. We develop and test social media–based, automated interventions (e.g., chatbots) that seek to reduce the risk for negative mental health outcomes by: 

    1. Encouraging healthier social media interactions. 

    2. Promoting potentially protective social media interactions. 

    3. Reducing the impact of negative social media experiences.  

Guiding Principles

At PRIDE iM, our work is centered around the guiding principles of health equity: 

  1. Fairness: LGBTQ+ people should get the level of health they need.
  2. Opportunity: LGBTQ+ people should have a just chance of attaining their highest level of health.  
  3. Quality: LGBTQ+ people should get high quality care regardless of personal characteristics, such as gender identity, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, geographic location, and socioeconomic status.  
  4. Social justice: LGBTQ+ people deserve equal rights and opportunities – this includes good health. 

 

Values
  1. We believe in equity and compassion. We strive to ensure that our research and its results are inclusive of everyone in the queer community, particularly those with less means and resources.   
  2. We believe that health equity can only be achieved by implementing the principles of antiracism in our lab activities. We intend to serve historically marginalized groups of intersecting identities with our research, and therefore, we believe that our lab activities must actively oppose racial prejudice and promote racial equality. We strive to abide by the “ten simple rules for building an antiracist lab” proposed by Chaudhary and Berhe in 2020.  
  3. We are relentless. We are determined because we care deeply about the well-being of the groups we serve with our research.  
  4. We are collaborative. We know that we know little, and we know that our work cannot be done without the knowledge and experience of the communities we intend to serve with our research and without sharing power with them. We are always looking for ways to learn from others and improve our research.  
  5. We are evidence-based. We base our research approaches in existing evidence, and if this evidence is not available, we design and conduct studies to generate new evidence. 
  6. We are transparent. We are accountable to the communities we serve with our research, our funders, and the community organizations that partner with our work.