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 ...