Melissa Hamachek’s Journey to Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
Melissa Hamachek became passionate about mental health as a nurse educator for the Wisconsin prison system. She saw the impact untreated mental illness could have on individuals — many received mental healthcare for the first time while incarcerated.
“I thought, ‘this is so backwards.’ Why are we waiting for people to fail to give them the care they need?” Melissa said.
Her time as a nurse educator opened Melissa’s eyes to the need for more mental health treatment opportunities statewide and led her to pursue mental health as a focus after her decades-long nursing career. Melissa became an assistant professor of nursing at Bellin College in 2020, where she helps students understand mental health in a course through the lens of patients and their own healthcare journeys.
Now, Melissa combines her decades of experience as a nurse and educator to care for patients as a psychiatric nurse practitioner, hoping to support more patients in the region who are looking for support.
A New Chapter in Psychiatric Care
When the College launched the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) program in 2024, Melissa was drawn to it as a way to touch patients’ lives as a mental health provider herself. Earlier this year, she became one of the first graduates from the program and joined Bay Psychiatry of Wisconsin as a psychiatric nurse practitioner shortly after graduation.
As a graduating class of four students, Melissa and her classmates in the program received individualized attention and worked closely with faculty, who all came from different levels of mental healthcare from pediatrics to geriatrics.
“Our faculty were all practicing in different areas, so you got that different view of the whole lifespan,” Melissa said.
Melissa had an extensive career as a nurse for 33 years and has been an educator for 15 years. Now she is adjusting to a new title as a provider at Bay Psychiatry, and she said the PMHNP program has prepared her for the responsibility to prescribe medications and document the process.
“Going from being very comfortable in my roles as a nurse and an educator to going to be the student, it puts you in that learner mode again and it was uncomfortable, but the program did such a good job of translating the classroom stuff into real practice,” Melissa said.
The Demand for Mental Health Providers Grows
Years after seeing people receive mental health treatment for the first time while incarcerated, Melissa is now helping patients access care earlier, before a mental health challenge becomes a crisis.
The development of the PMHNP program and Melissa’s transition to nurse practitioner helps answer the need for more mental health providers in the region. More than one in five adults in the U.S. have a mental illness, but only about half of them receive treatment every year, according to the National Alliance on Mental Illness. Similarly, more than one in seven kids over age 6 have a mental health disorder but only about half of them receive treatment.
Melissa chose Bellin College’s PMHNP program to continue her graduate studies largely because of the clinical experience and number of clinical hours required. The College works with students and partners them up with a clinical site, where Melissa saw firsthand some of the day-to-day challenges that prevented patients from getting care quickly in northeastern Wisconsin. Some struggled to find a facility on their bus route or couldn’t afford a bus pass for the month to get to the appointment. Others couldn’t see their provider as regularly as they wished because providers schedules filled up three months or more in advance.
Helping Patients Take the First Step
Her schedule at Bay Psychiatry is filling up quickly, and one thing continues to be clear — everyone wants support, though every patient’s challenges are different.
“It’s a whole mix of all different things that you get to see people for. It’s not just anxiety, depression, or insomnia,” Melissa said.
Looking back, Melissa wouldn’t have chosen any other program to prepare her for the breadth of psychiatric care she now provides. She is excited to help take her experience and help her patients navigate the mental illness. She wants them and others to understand they are not alone in their struggles.
“It’s important to reach out and find a provider who listens and they feel comfortable with, and gets them on a treatment plan where they’re functioning well again like they want to be,” she said. “The biggest thing is to make that first step and reach out for help.”
If you are interested in learning more about Bellin College’s Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program, visit https://www.bellincollege.edu/.
