Dr Mariyana Schoultz

Mariyana Schoultz is Associate Professor in Mental Health at Northumbria University. Her particular interest is in the implementation and evaluation of psychosocial interventions and health services, spanning psychological first aid and trauma-informed workforce support, veteran social prescribing, mental health nursing practice and risk assessment, and mindfulness-based interventions for chronic illness. She is Co-lead of the international “Getting PFA Right” PFA series with King’s College London and the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, and has previously led the Mental Health Research Group and served as Deputy for Knowledge and Research Exchange.

She is the UK lead for a large international research consortium examining mental health, loneliness and social media use during and post COVID-19 pandemic, spanning collaborators across Norway, the USA, Australia and beyond resulting in a number of publications and policy impact in the named countries.

Her work has been funded by public and research councils including the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), NHS England and the Chief Scientist Office (Scottish Government), European funding through Erasmus+, and charitable funders including the Burdett Trust, Crohn’s and Colitis UK and the RCN Foundation. She uses mixed and qualitative methods, including co-production and the Person-Based Approach.

Her applied work includes a co-produced, Person-Based Approach adaptation of psychological first aid for care home staff (Schoultz et al., 2026, International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health), building on her UK survey establishing the first evidence on PFA uptake in nursing homes, cited in a House of Lords report on care home workforce support. She is currently developing the Minimum-Viable Psychological First Aid (MVPFA) framework, specifying the non-negotiable core components of Psychological First Aid alongside an adaptable periphery for safe adaptation across occupational settings. She also led STRENCO (2017, Erasmus+), producing multiprofessional mental health competencies with partners across Ireland, Finland, Belgium and Greece, now used in European education and training contexts.

Mariyana has supervised eight PhD students to completion and two ongoing, and has examined doctoral theses in the UK and internationally. She is Special Editor for the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, a peer reviewer for NIHR, and a Committee Member of the EUPHA Mental Health Section.