It was December 2014 at Westpark Springs Behavioral Hospital and as a newfound Psychiatric Technician, I was entrenched in the physical embodiments of human minds deemed too darkened and damaged to co-exist with the rest of society. Rounding on my last patient of the day, I opened the stainless steel door to the room occupied by Mr. Robinson; a man plagued by a life-time of violent psychosis and commanding voices who was ultimately deemed “incurable” by medical doctors. To my amazement, I found him speaking calmly and coherently to the Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner, expressing that the harrowing voices that had tormented him for years seemed to have subsided. Over the next hour, we learned that Mr. Robinson had benefited tremendously from the advanced practice nursing model of care that focused on biopsychosocial and evidence-based approaches as …show more content…
Continuously driven by true compassion and interest in the human body and mind, I completed academic and clinical internships at Baylor College of Medicine, UTMB, Emory University, and Texas Children’s Hospital. Although I was ultimately accepted into a guaranteed medical school admission program, it was the accumulation of these numerous and diverse medical experiences that led to my discovery of the nursing field after years of questioning the medical model of approach to healing the sick. Ultimately, I decided to forgo my admission to medical school and have since held positions in management, education, and pharmaceutical industry. My conviction to pursue nursing and Psychiatry has never faltered; rather, it has been fiercely reignited and solidified by my experience working in the nursing department of a psychiatric