More About Me

---

My nursing career began in 2003 with a straightforward conviction: that showing up fully for another person during their hardest moments is one of the most meaningful things you can do. What I didn't know then was how much that conviction would be tested and refined, over the next two decades.

More than a decade of my career was dedicated to serving Veterans living with serious mental illness. These were patients navigating the intersection of complex psychiatric conditions, chronic medical illness, trauma histories, and life circumstances that defied simple categorization. There was no textbook algorithm that covered what walked through the door. What those years gave me wasn't just clinical experience, they gave me a deep respect for diagnostic precision and a clear understanding of what's actually at stake when you get it wrong.

That work is what led me to pursue my MSN and become a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. And it's also what showed me a gap I couldn't stop thinking about.

When I entered advanced practice, I noticed something that I now hear from nearly every early-career PMHNP I talk to: the training prepares you to pass boards, but it doesn't always prepare you for the patient sitting in front of you. The one who doesn't fit the criteria cleanly. The one whose depression might be bipolar disorder. The one whose ADHD presentation is actually trauma. The silence after the appointment where you wonder - did I miss something?

That feeling is real. It's common. And for too long, there hasn't been a resource that addresses it directly, practically, and at the level of a peer who has actually been in that room.

I created PMHNP Mastery Academy because I wanted to build what I wish had existed for me.

Today I hold dual board certifications as a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP-BC) and Clinical Nurse Leader (CNL-BC), and I continue to see patients in my own private psychiatric practice, Emerald City Wellness, PLLC. I'm not teaching from memory - I'm still in the work, every week, navigating the same clinical complexities that you are.

My approach at the Academy is built on one core belief: that exceptional psychiatric care requires more than knowledge. It requires a way of thinking. The CLARITY Method, the E.D.I.T. Protocol, and every framework I teach emerged from real clinical problems that needed real structural solutions - not more information, but better thinking tools.

Great clinicians are not defined solely by what they know. They are defined by how they think.

If that resonates with you, you're in the right place.

Ready to think differently about psychiatric practice?

Start with the CLARITY Framework - the seven-step diagnostic structure at the foundation of everything taught at PMHNP Mastery Academy.