Clinical Education & Practice
Putting mental health science into practice.
Mental health knowledge is most useful when we can understand it, apply it, and adapt it to the people and communities we serve.
NRC Praxis brings together clinical practice, professional education, and accessible mental health resources to help translate research and theory into meaningful real-world application.
What Is NRC Praxis?
Knowledge matters most when we can use it.
Research continues to expand what we understand about learning, behavior, emotion, culture, and the nervous system. But knowing what research says and knowing what to do with that information aren't always the same thing.
NRC Praxis exists in the space between knowledge and application.
We translate mental health science into practical education, resources, and clinical care. Our work emphasizes not only what may help, but why, how, for whom, and under what circumstances.
That means connecting research evidence with clinical expertise, neurobiological processes, sociocultural and developmental context, and the lived experiences of the people we serve.
Informed by Research. Built for Application.
Research and practice serve different—but connected—purposes.
Our research program investigates questions about mental health practice, professional knowledge, clinical decision-making, and implementation. NRC Praxis focuses on the next question:
What can we do with what we're learning?
Research activities, publications, study information, and the research network are housed separately from NRC Praxis, while findings from that work can inform the educational resources and professional development offered here.
Why Praxis?
From knowledge to action.
Praxis is the process of putting knowledge and theory into action.
That's the idea at the center of NRC Praxis.
Mental health practice rarely happens under perfectly controlled conditions. People bring different histories, cultures, identities, environments, nervous systems, relationships, resources, and needs into every interaction.
Rather than treating research findings or therapeutic models as instructions to follow mechanically, we focus on understanding the processes that may make an intervention useful—and using that understanding to make more informed decisions about when and how to apply it.
Knowledge gets better when more people contribute.
No single profession, discipline, theoretical orientation, or type of expertise has all the answers.
NRC Praxis values exchange among clinicians, researchers, educators, peer professionals, students, community members, and others whose knowledge and experiences can deepen how we understand mental health and put that understanding into practice.
You'll see those perspectives represented throughout our educational materials, resources, guest contributions, and collaborative projects.