Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner

Carolina Nursing’s top-ranked Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) specialty offers the following distance-based degree options:

• MSN
• DNP
• Post-Graduate Certificate Program

Our online PMHNP program prepares students to be clinically competent and culturally sensitive advanced practice registered nurses. PMHNPs assess, facilitate and manage the psychiatric and mental health care needs of individuals, families, groups and communities in a variety of public, private, community, inpatient, and team-based, multidisciplinary practice settings.

Curriculum and Clinical Experience

The PMHNP specialty curriculum embraces a lifespan perspective in psychiatric mental health diagnostic reasoning, psychopharmacology, individual, group and family psychotherapies and management of complex psychiatric illnesses.

An emphasis on the interaction and integration of common mental and physical health problems gives the student an evidence-based framework for comprehensive psychiatric-mental health care. The emphasis on cultural sensitivity challenges students’ assumptions and value judgments, and promotes critical analysis of how racial and cultural biases in psychiatric diagnosis have led to disparities in care.

Clinical sites are selected to meet course objectives and individual student learning needs. The PMHNP option promotes and encourages students to complete their clinical hours in their own communities and/or regions of the state of North Carolina and beyond, depending upon their learning objectives, interests and scholarship.

Precepted clinical experiences include psychiatric assessment and comprehensive evaluations, documentation according to federal and state requirements, implementation of individual, family and group therapy, and medication initiation and management. Graduates are able to assume an expanded scope of practice including prescriptive authority and collaborative management of health problems across the lifespan.

Graduates are eligible to take either the American Nurses’ Association (ANCC)  or the American Academy of Nurse Pracitioners board certification examinations for the Psychiatric-Mental Health NP (Across the Lifespan).