Andrea Kemp is back for Part 2, and this one is for the students. If Part 1 took you inside the inpatient unit, this is the practical playbook: how to find a preceptor when your program won't, how to walk into day one of clinical ready, and how to actually learn once you're there instead of watching someone else work.

Andrea has precepted students for years and now teaches in a PMHNP program, so she sees both sides. She's blunt about what separates the students who get hired from the ones who get forgotten, and almost none of it is knowing every diagnosis. Show up with a notebook, not an iPad. Make yourself an asset, not a liability. Ask three good questions at the end of the day and look up the rest yourself. Curiosity over confidence, every single time.

The part that stuck with me: your didactic classes teach you how to be a provider, but your clinicals teach you how to be in a room with a human, and those are two different skills. Andrea walks through how she actually talks to patients — the five questions she never skips, why silence is a tool, why she'd rather ask a hard question than let someone off the hook, and how she narrows two hundred medications down to five without ever tricking anyone into a prescription.

We also get into the stuff nobody warns you about. Paying for clinicals. Preceptors who don't know how to use you. What to do when a patient doesn't want to be there. And how to protect your license when the board holds NPs to a harder line than physicians, including the state-board resource most students don't know exists.

If you're in a program right now, or about to start clinicals, take notes on this one.

Go listen. Then tell me what you wish you'd known sooner. — Lindsay

LISTEN TO NO PRIOR AUTH 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2xQMQAfCsq3OrVz3RTndA80gfFEFOsez 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1893233469 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5tNbJqeMERnglfTHedOhym 🌐 Website: https://psychnpfellowship.com/podcast/ 👥 Community: https://www.skool.com/psych

#PsychNP #PMHNP #PMHNPstudent #NPschool #NursePractitionerStudent #ClinicalRotations #MentalHealth #NoPriorAuth

I went to school with Andrea Kemp at Arizona State, so I've watched her become one of the sharpest inpatient psych NPs I know. She almost went to law school. Psych won. Eleven years later she runs a step-down unit, teaches in a PMHNP program, and says the thing most people get wrong about inpatient psychiatry starts at the front door.

That locked door? It isn't there to protect the world from the patients. It's there because someone is not safe, and the unit is where they finally get to be. Most of what you picture from TV is wrong, and Andrea spends this episode setting it straight.

This is Part 1 of two, and we stay on the unit: what inpatient psych actually is, the medication puzzle she loves solving, and the hardest part of the job — involuntary treatment, and what it means to take someone's autonomy while still treating them like a person. Her rule has stuck with me. A patient may not remember the meds you gave them, but they will always remember whether you talked to them like a human being.

We also get honest about safety. Andrea has been assaulted on the job, and she doesn't sugarcoat it. It's also, oddly enough, where she met her husband — he stepped in the day a patient's family member threatened her. She talks about all of it without flinching, and about why she still loves this work.

And because she got hired five months before graduation and negotiated $130,000 as a brand-new grad, she walks through exactly how she pulled it off. If your first job is for learning and not earning, she'll show you how to still get paid while you learn.

Come back for Part 2, where we get into prepping for clinical and everything she wishes psych NP students knew.

Go listen. Then tell me what surprised you. — Lindsay

CONNECT WITH ANDREA Inpatient-focused community for psych NPs & PAs — launching soon Speaking on NP decision fatigue at the Southwest NP Symposium (Mesa, AZ · late July) [add Andrea's TikTok / community link]

LISTEN TO NO PRIOR AUTH 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2xQMQAfCsq3OrVz3RTndA80gfFEFOsez 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1893233469 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5tNbJqeMERnglfTHedOhym 🌐 Website: https://psychnpfellowship.com/podcast/ 👥 Community: https://www.skool.com/psych

#PsychNP #PMHNP #InpatientPsych #PsychiatricNursing #MentalHealth #NursePractitioner #PMHNPstudent #NoPriorAuth

Most of the guests on this show built private practices and never looked back. Ben Egbers is the outlier. He built one in rural Montana, and then he walked away from it.

Ben came to psychiatry the long way. A psychology and German degree in 2000. Years as a case manager, then teaching English in Europe. An avalanche in the backcountry that he barely survived, and that he dug his best friend out of. A career in pharma he hated, a $60,000 pay cut to go back to bedside psych nursing, and his own recovery from alcohol use disorder — this month he's ten years sober. He didn't finish his nursing doctorate until 2021.

Today he runs some of the most intensive treatments in the field, deep TMS and ketamine, while holding a belief that sounds almost backwards: the goal is the least medication a person needs, not the most.

We get into all of it. Why he opened a private practice and then let it go (the billing alone will make you wince). How he partners with therapists in a way that has them telling him "you're the first psychiatric provider who ever called me." What ten years of sobriety taught him about who's actually ready for help. And why he's now stepping back from the interventional work to train in psychodynamic therapy and do something that feels more like him.

If you've ever felt like an outlier in this field, or like the "right" path just wasn't fitting, this one's for you.

Go listen. Then tell me which part landed. — Lindsay

CHAPTERS 00:00 The cold open 01:09 Meet Ben Egbers 02:40 From a psychology & German degree to psych NP 03:30 The book that hooked him: "An Unquiet Mind" 05:10 Community mental health, then a pivot to Europe 08:30 The avalanche that changed his path 09:55 Hating med-surg and pharma — the 2am misery 12:50 A $60K pay cut back to bedside psych nursing 14:20 Why he's the "outlier": walking away from private practice 21:00 Networking with therapists (and picking up the phone) 24:50 What he hated most: the billing 25:40 Ten years sober: his recovery story 30:40 Being a provider in recovery, and who's ready for help 34:00 Psychodynamics 101: the unconscious and transference 39:40 The fellowship, and training toward therapy 47:10 What "No Prior Auth" means to him

CONNECT WITH BEN Axis Integrated Mental Health — Colorado (deep TMS, ketamine) | https://axismh.com/

LISTEN TO NO PRIOR AUTH 🎥 YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL2xQMQAfCsq3OrVz3RTndA80gfFEFOsez 🍎 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1893233469 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5tNbJqeMERnglfTHedOhym 🌐 Website: https://psychnpfellowship.com/podcast/ 👥 Community: https://www.skool.com/psych

#PsychNP #PMHNP #InterventionalPsychiatry #Ketamine #TMS #Recovery #Sobriety #Psychodynamic #MentalHealth