09/14/2023
I have been getting the question a lot and would love to educate you on what functional psychiatry actually is!
I have been working as a psychiatric nurse practitioner and as a functional medicine provider for over 4 years. My psychiatric NP job has been in the traditional medical world where I see patients and prescribe medications to treat psychiatric illnesses. In my work in the functional medicine realm of medicine I work to find the root causes for symptoms and diseases. Most of my functional medicine patients also have psychiatric diagnoses. I look at the whole person, and all the symptoms in all places of the body (not just the brain) to figure out where the dysfunction is happening. Once we find and treat that, the symptoms in the rest of the body improve, if not resolve.
I have basically decided to bring both worlds and my passion together more formally. As a functional psychiatric nurse practitioner (a new term I basically gave myself but describes best what I do) I look for the root causes for psychiatric illness. I still prescribe psychiatric medications as I do find them helpful in many cases but I also look at a lot of other factors involved such as nutritional deficiencies, gut dysfunction, toxins, bacteria, viruses, hormone imbalances, and lifestyle factors that could be contributing to brain inflammation. I look at the whole person, not just the brain to treat patients.
Basically the traditional medical world does not allow me to practice in this fashion so I had to go outside of it and create my own practice so that I could treat patients the way I felt was best.
Please Share so we can educate patients on a better way of care and make functional psychiatry the norm instead of the exception!