Are we Crazy? An Urgent Call for Mental Health Skill Development in All NP Education

Now that we know the brain responds to inflammation throughout the body as well as chronic diseases causing symptoms of mental illness, it is time to teach nurse practitioner students to identify and treat mild to moderate mental illnesses in all healthcare settings. But the question is always "how?".

This presentation will take you thru the process of developing a mental health course or adapting other courses to include mental health, for nurse practitioner students whether in primary care, women’s health, pediatrics, or adult health. Utilizing the principles of  Jim Zull, a neuroscientist, who developed teaching strategies to engage the entire brain, and on line education’s “best practices”, you will learn how to identify what needs to be taught and how to teach it constructing unfolding case studies.  Using brief videos or written scenarios, your  students will enter the patient’s world, which you have created. Then you will learn to construct a history and physical as well as a family genogram.  The student will engage with this patient, learning about management of mental illness thru on-line discussion boards. The students will order lab work and screening tools, which you will then supply, and develop a comprehensive plan of care. Using this process, research shows, students will be able to recall the process of treating mental illness thru utilizing screening, brief interventions, and rescreening to evaluate treatment effectiveness, when they are challenged with practice in real healthcare settings. All of these concepts are learned in an NP practice context with interactive experiences and engagement.

We will also cover the use of the family genogram for thorough family assessment with the integration of health inequities research. These case studies can be offered in a stand alone mental health course for NP students which is applicable in any health care setting or integrated into courses which teach management of physical illness complicated by mental illness. This teaching strategy is effective and robust allowing for adaptations to include complex real life scenarios such as complications of prescription drug abuse and intimate partner violence, for example.