Andrea Hansen

My journey into mental health care wasn't what I originally planned. I was going to school to be a pharmacist and felt very passionate about working in healthcare, but I found myself struggling with my own health journey at the time. I grew up in a really rural community in the middle of nowhere, and seeking mental health care wasn't something that occurred to me. I ended up stumbling out of pharmacy school because my health got so bad, and after having like 3 surgeries in a period of 3 years, I started doing a master's degree in mental health counseling. It was probably the therapy I needed at the time, to be honest. I became very passionate about serious and persistent mental illness very quickly. I found myself not really liking stereotypes around mental health, who provides care, the lack of scientific knowledge around it, and how many people automatically assume it's just you take medications and that's your only option. I realized that I wanted to get into the profession to hopefully make it so people didn't need that as a profession. I think a good therapist is always trying to shut themselves out of business and get people out of therapy. After completing my master's degree, I immediately started working with people who have serious and persistent mental illness, like schizophrenia, first-time psychosis, borderline personality disorder, and I immediately started working with at-risk youth and their families, going into the community, and essentially trying to keep people out of incarceration. I found really my niche with that, whether working with adults or kids. I've worked in every level of care my state provides, from hospital systems to community-based services, inpatient, outpatient. I'm licensed in 8 states and have gotten to practice across multiple locations, which taught me a lot about infrastructure strengths and infrastructure deficits. About 2 years ago, I got to work in a system that supported mental health and substance use as treating the same problem, and that's when I really fell in love with my job. I got to start treating trauma as a trauma-certified, trauma-specialized provider. I identify with a lot of the stories, even though I haven't gone through them, and I see a little bit of myself in each client that I work with. My second passion project became providing supervision to as many people as I can, particularly women that are struggling with mental health and substance use that come from disadvantaged backgrounds, and ultimately trying to represent more than just white women providing care services, but representing a more diverse background, because that is who we serve.