We recently connected with Jessica Oldham and have shared our conversation below.

Jessica, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to hear the backstory behind a risk you’ve taken – whether big or small, walk us through what it was like and how it ultimately turned out.

After struggling with my own postpartum mental health I observed first hand the lack of resources available for people planning to become pregnant, pregnant, or postpartum with mental health issues. This situation fueled my natural tendencies to advance my education and help this vulnerable population. At the time there were only a handful of psychiatric prescribers in the Denver Metro area working in the area of perinatal mental health and I planned on basing my entire practice around helping this group of people. It was a risk as I had never owned a business let alone one that specialized in an area that was unique in psychiatry. I was not sure how many patients would seek out my services, especially with the stigma surrounding needing mental health help when pregnant or postpartum. I took the risk knowing that it may be challenging to break the stigma and urge patients to seek out specialized help. I’m so glad I took that risk, as now my practice is flourishing and daily I get to see improvements in my patients and watch those patients share the knowledge they have learned through me to their friends and family, therefore impacting even more people. Myself and my colleagues at Rocky Mountain Mental Health get the privilege of helping not only one person but a family and generations to come.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

When I was in my 20s I desired to be a nurse as I really enjoyed taking care of and helping people. I pursued a Bachelor’s degree in Nursing and during that journey I fell in love with women’s health. But, once graduating and working as an RN I noticed that mental health was often neglected when patients were seeking medical treatment and I felt that is where I belonged bridging that gap. Soon after I worked towards and received a master’s degree specializing as a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP). I had the personal experience not long after receiving this degree of struggling with my own postpartum mental health issues. This experience blindsided me and I suffered with shame and delayed my treatment partly related to stigma and lack of resources. Once going through the process of hunting down specialized treatment and getting on the path to feeling better I decided I could mesh my love for women’s health and mental health and create a psychiatry practice that focused on treating/supporting those with perinatal mental health issues. This practice I founded along with my husband Joe is called Rocky Mountain Mental Health (RMMH).

Rocky Mountain Mental Health, P.C. is an outpatient psychiatry practice that focuses on treating issues related to Reproductive Psychiatry. Reproductive Psychiatry is a person’s mental, emotional, and behavioral health conditions at every stage of the childbearing process. This includes planning for a family, pregnancy, adopting, surrogacy, childbirth, parenting, miscarriages, and struggles with infertility. Not only do we offer this specialty service we also provide general psychiatry services across the life span. At RMMH we are a group of Psychiatric Nurse Practitioners that have common philosophies of psychiatry and believe patients deserve customized treatment plans with personalized service. We believe patients need to understand their options when it comes to psychiatric meds, and they feel are an empowered member of the their own treatment team.

Any stories or insights that might help us understand how you’ve built such a strong reputation?

Being genuine, authentic, and relatable. We do not take the approach in mental health care that we are the authority of the patients mental health but rather we are on their team. They are the expert on how they are feeling and we have expertise in assessing the way they feel, identifying the issue (s), and curating a plan that they are comfortable with. We feel as humans an important aspect to feeling better is feeling confident in the plan created and having buy in on that plan to execute it.

How do you keep your team’s morale high?

Be involved in day to day job functioning of your employees. I not only manage the practice but I also have a full case load of patients. I function daily in the same capacity as the other providers at my office so I see and feel the system failures in the business. I can relate to these struggles and help come up with solutions jointly with the staff. Also, we ask our staff for feedback and if they have any ideas of things that we should be doing differently that could optimize their experience or the patient experience.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.rmmh.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/rockymtmentalhealth/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RMMHPC

Image Credits
Brooke Leigh Photography