“Behind every diagnosis is a person, and behind every person is a story that deserves to be heard.”
My journey in mental health began long before I became a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner. I have been a nurse since 2014, and throughout my career, I have had the privilege of caring for people during some of the most vulnerable moments of their lives.
I began my nursing career in psychiatry. I still remember one of my very first patients, a neurosurgeon from Jamaica who was living with schizophrenia. Here was someone who had spent his life caring for others, yet now needed someone to care for him. That experience stayed with me. It reminded me that mental illness does not discriminate. It can affect anyone, regardless of education, profession, background, or accomplishments. More importantly, I saw the person beyond the diagnosis.
Over the years, my path took me through several areas of nursing, including orthopedics, cardiac care, psychiatric nursing, and intensive critical care, where I cared for patients with highly complex medical conditions. Yet no matter where I worked, I continued to find myself drawn to the emotional and psychological side of healing. I wanted to know more than what was happening to my patients, I wanted to understand what had happened in their lives, what they were carrying, and how I could help them feel whole again.
Eventually, the calling became impossible to ignore. Mental health was where I belonged.
Today, I work with individuals across the lifespan and have a particular passion for caring for people whose mental health needs may feel complicated or difficult to untangle. My clinical experience includes depression, anxiety, ADHD, trauma related conditions, and more complex psychiatric conditions such as bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and co occurring mental health conditions.
But I do not believe you should ever feel reduced to a diagnosis. When you sit down with me, I want to hear your story. What have you been experiencing? When did things begin to change? What has helped? What has not? What are you afraid to say out loud? And most importantly, what would feeling like yourself again look like for you?
I meet you wherever you are in your mental health journey. You do not need to have everything figured out before coming to see me. My role is to listen without judgment, look beyond the surface symptoms, and work alongside you to understand what may be happening and develop a treatment plan that makes sense for you.
My compassion for mental health is not only professional. It is personal. After experiencing postpartum depression myself, I learned what it feels like to struggle silently while the people around you may have no idea how much you are hurting.
I was afraid to tell my story. I felt ashamed to admit that I was struggling, and at the time, I did not feel that I had the support system I needed to say, I am not okay. That experience changed me.
It taught me that sometimes the strongest person in the room is also the person quietly struggling the most. It taught me how much courage it can take to ask for help. And it reinforced something I now carry into every patient encounter: people need a safe place where they can tell the truth about how they are feeling without fear of being judged.
That is the environment I strive to create at Boune Psychiatry & Wellness. You do not have to arrive with the right words. You do not have to hide the difficult parts of your story. And you do not have to navigate your mental health journey alone.
We will start wherever you are, listen to what your mind and body have been telling you, and determine the next steps together. Your story matters. Your well being matters. And you deserve care that sees the whole person, not just the diagnosis.
You do not have to navigate this alone. Take the first step whenever you are ready.
