How Holistic Psychiatry Found Me

If you asked me as a kid what I wanted to be when I grew up, a psychiatric nurse practitioner definitely would not have made the list. And for most of my life I associated “holistic” with “snake oil.” I didn’t really know what it was about, but I certainly didn’t take it seriously. However, as both my personal life and career progressed, mental health became something I simply couldn’t ignore. And as I delved into the world of healing the mind, I became convinced that we as an industry are going about it all wrong. This is the story of how mental health and holistic medicine found me. 

My Formative Years

              I grew up as the youngest of three in a small town in rural Iowa. We had everything we needed in a material sense: food, shelter, clothing, and whatever newest Nintendo console was out. My family cared about each other, but we didn’t really talk about our emotions. The message I came away with was something like, “Why are you crying? You have a roof over your head.” I really didn’t have time for my own emotions anyway. I was a fun-loving, spontaneous, and impulsive kid, and emotions had little to do with catching fogs or building forts with my friends. I escaped the “inconvenience” of feeling and processing my emotional pain even through some pretty traumatic events: my mom fighting cancer, my best friend dying, and my childhood church falling apart. This pattern of glossing over emotions went on through high-school and into college. 

The Crisis

              I studied nursing at Mount Mercy College and graduated in 2009. Soon after, I lost a job that was essential for my planned career path and a short time later went through a breakup with the girl I wanted to marry. What I thought was my future was gone. I had had no experience finding my emotions before this time, but they had no trouble finding me. Something in me broke, and for the first time in my life I was absolutely overwhelmed with anxiety and panic. I fought it and fought it with no success, and it eventually turned into depression. The depression turned into despair. The despair turned into suicidality. And that began my crazy journey in the world of mental health.

Dead Ends

Around this time, I was evaluated by a psychiatrist and a neuro-psychologist. I was diagnosed with OCD, depression, ADHD and anxiety. Not knowing where else to turn, I decided to try psychiatric medication. I was so relieved to think that I could just take a pill and my problems would go away. Just the idea that there was a solution gave me hope. So I tried a psychiatric medication… and then another… and then another. In all, I tried five different psychiatric medications: two made me more suicidal, one clouded my thinking so much it interfered with work, and another caused me to have restless leg syndrome that lasted for two years after I stopped taking it. None of them improved my depression.

The Path Forward

Disillusioned, I decided to stop the medications and face these annoying emotions head on. I began doing counseling. To my surprise, I learned that the emotions I had been ignoring had a purpose: they were there to lead me to wounds from my past. And wounds I found. For the first time, I grieved things like my mother’s cancer and the death of my best friend. I found places where I had believed that I was worthless or alone, and I brought truth to those places so they could heal.

A key change in my depression coincided with the moment when my counselor looked at me and said, “You need to take your life back.” I realized that I believed that I was a victim of my broken mind. I believed that I had a handful of diagnoses that would never change. I believed that my happiness was dependent on a pill the size of a tic-tac. Ultimately, I believed that I was powerless to heal my own mind.

As those false messages were erased, my depression lifted. I was shocked. The only thing that had changed was what I was believing about myself. Something a pill could never do, and something a diagnosis makes difficult to see as an option. I learned that all the diagnoses that I had been given as labels could fall off. I don’t consider them applicable to me anymore.  Those symptoms were merely an outward expression of inner turmoil caused by years of ignored emotional pain and lies I believed about myself.

The Psychiatric Unit

Those experiences sparked my desire to help others with their mental health. I decided to quit my job in dialysis after five years and began working at a child/adolescent psychiatric and behavioral health unit. I absolutely loved working with those kids. Ironically, one of my main jobs was to administer medications. Although medications had not worked for me, I started my career there hopeful that they could work for others. Every morning I would set up med cup after med cup. But it bothered me. How could giving over 10 different medications to one child be helpful? How could anyone know how that cocktail could be impacting their infinitely complex mind? What were the repercussions of that mix in the short-term, let alone the long-term?

Only Getting Worse

              These children were being treated with the most advanced psychiatric medications the world had to offer, yet half of them (that’s not a guess, I researched the number) would come back to the psych unit, and many of them worse off than they were before. Some were readmitted after overdosing on the very medication intended to cure their suicidality. Some would return having gained over 10 pounds in just a few weeks, the first steps toward morbid obesity on what is called “the metabolic highway” caused by the newer antipsychotics. Some would become so out of touch with their emotions they would lose all control in fits of spontaneous rage.  

              But for many of these kids, it didn’t seem like these medications did anything other than make them less alive. More apathetic. I lost track of how many children on meds told me that they felt like zombies. For some perspective, the same medication used to supposedly treat psychosis was also used simply as a sedative when someone was out of control, like a chemical restraint. I became more and more convinced that medications worked primarily by suppressing all emotions. The very emotions I had learned were there to guide me to my own healing. These medications were not making these children better.

Medicating Trauma

              As I would hear the tragic histories of these children, about their home life, circumstances, and past experiences, it made less and less sense to me that their problems had anything to do with chemical imbalances. I began thinking “Are we just medicating trauma and relational problems?” My conscience began troubling me more and more with every pill I watched a child swallow. “Are they believing they are helpless victims of a ‘broken mind’ just like I’d believed? Where’s the message of hope and resilience in that?” I knew I had escaped the chains of these messages and now I knew I wanted to help other do the same.

A Better Way

Please don’t get me wrong. I have nothing but the highest praise for my coworkers on the psych unit. The whole staff was working their hardest to help these kids through incredibly intense periods in their lives. And I would definitely recommend the unit to any parent who has a child in a mental health crisis. I just was ready to do more to help these kids either not get to a crisis in the first place or to truly heal so they wouldn’t be in crisis again. I wanted to help people believe they could change, and to thrive by overcoming struggles with their mental health.

I knew one way to do that would be to become a psychiatric nurse practitioner, but even then I had a problem. Many psych NPs are expected to primarily schedule 15-30 minute appointments for simply prescribing psychiatric medications, because that is what insurance pays the most for. Psych NPs are qualified to provide psychotherapy, but most never get a chance to. I felt stuck.

That is when I decided that I would have to open my own practice. I knew of other psychiatrist and nurse psychiatrists that were going the private practice route to allow them to practice holistically. Like me, they were interested in treating the whole person, not just symptoms. Even before I started my grad school classes, I was already researching how to run a business and alternative approaches to mental health. All through grad school I was doing my own additional research and soon after graduation I also became certified in integrative health.

PMHNP

Through Atlas, I have now been seeing clients for one year as a holistic psychiatric nurse practitioner. It’s been a long journey from my own mental health crisis to being able to help others with theirs, but I’m so thankful for all that I’ve learned along the way. I’ve become passionate about helping others find deep, lasting healing, and it’s been rewarding to see psychotherapy and other alternatives to medication transform their lives, just like mine did.