More than 50 million people in the US live with mental health issues, and over half of them don’t get the help they need. Often there aren’t enough places to get care, or people don’t have the right health plan. The country needs more psych nurses, and one psych nurse practitioner turned that need into a $600,000 business.
These rates are from March 2024, when this was first written. Pay changes every year, so check current rates in Map My Pay.
How states rank for mental health care
I read an article in Forbes that looked at how well each state supports mental health care. It looked at a few things that may explain why care is so hard to get.
Here is what they found. Texas is at the very bottom for mental health support.
The South has the hardest time. That includes Texas, Mississippi and Alabama.
When we moved from New York to Sacramento, we thought there would be more support for people with mental health issues. Boy, were we wrong.
California is the 14th-worst state for mental health care, while New York is ranked 29th. The guest I interviewed on our podcast shed some light on why.
Why we don’t talk much about psych nursing here
A lot of our viewers are psych nurses. They ask if we think they should work in California. We don’t talk much about psych nursing because California doesn’t put mental health first.
You can see this in the low pay for psych nurses in the Sacramento area. I mean, seriously, $44 an hour. I know Salary.com is not the most accurate source, but these numbers are pretty close.
What I recommend: look at Iman’s path
Look at Iman, a psych nurse practitioner from New York City. She saw how hard it was for people to get mental health care, and she wanted to do something about it.
She had worked as a psych nurse in a few different roles. But as a staff nurse, there was only so much she could do to help.
Then she got her license to work on her own as an NP. Her client list grew faster than she ever thought it would.
Today, she owns a private practice. She sees patients who would have had to wait months to see someone through their health plan. In 2023, she earned $600,000 from her business.
With that money, she and her husband have looked into buying homes. They plan to rent them to Section 8 families who badly need a place they can afford. She took her own success and used it to help others.
If you are thinking about the NP path, read where nurse practitioners earn the most. For more nurses who built their own practice or business, see the most profitable nursing businesses.
Your next move
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The Nurses to Riches Accelerator is the plan Monica and I used to go from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California: license, city, hospital, and what to do with the money after.
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Written by Jason, RN. I went from $37 an hour in New York to $143 an hour in California and paid off $128K of debt in under a year. I share our numbers in the Nurses to Riches newsletter and on YouTube.