Nurse Practitioners have followed simliar paths in mental health care field
From Tracy to Tyler, Westbrook to Marshall, the region is home to a number of dependable clinics, hospitals and staff to treat people’s physical needs.
But what about healing the mind? While the stigma surrounding mental health persists, there are trained professionals who have dedicated themselves to heal others with scars that can’t be seen. Two of them — Jill Stoks and Kris Krautkremer — have opened a new office in Walnut Grove called North Creek Psychiatry & Wellness Collective and are accepting both inperson and telehealth appointments.
“We are Nurse Practitioners and specialize in mental health,” said Stoks. “We do medication management, and diagnosis and treatment of mental heath.”
North Creek offers psychiatric evaluations, medication management, and support for anxiety, depression ADHD and more.
Stoks, a 2001 graduate of Tracy Area High School, opened a private practice out of her home in 2020 and did home health care locally and in the Cities.
“It was going well; I was busy with it,” she said. “It was just hard to find employees at that time.”
Stoks and Krautkremer were both nursing professors at Rasmussen College; they were in the same classes before working together, and both transitioned into psychiatric mental health as Nurse Practitioners.
STOKS
KRAUTKREMER
“We graduated the same day; we went every step along the way together,” Stoks said. “We just kept talking and wanted to reach the smaller communities. So this is huge for us.”
Krautkremer lives in Mankato — a city that could be classified as “big” compared to small towns in southwest Minnesota — but is well aware of the needs in rural areas of the state.
“There is a huge need,” she said. “I can speak personally with a child with ADHD — trying to find services for my child. That was a driving force for me to kind of switch gears. With Jill and I both being professors — I thought, ‘I think I’m going to dabble into mental health,’ and she kind of said the same thing.”
Krautkremer said people in both large and small communities are having to wait for months, and even a year, to be seen by a provider.
“We’re building our clientele pretty quickly,” she said. “I can’t wait six months for my son to be seen; I feel like we can make a huge impact, whether it’s in Mankato or Jill’s communities in the rural area as well.”
Krautkremer and Stoks said healing the mind is no different than healing the body. The main difference, they say, is the stigma surrounding mental health.
“Everybody has mental health, whether it’s good or bad,” said Stoks. “It fluctuates every day with how we handle it; COVID brought on a whole ‘nother level of mental health concerns, and that is continuing all these years later.
The pair works with adults as well as children 5 and older. Both are mothers to six children — ranging from 8 to 22 years old — and are in tune to the needs of youth.
“We’ve seen a lot of those age stages as our kids have grown,” Stoks said. “It is difficult with kids. They express their mental health a lot different than adults do. It can come across as anger and retaliation when they’re sad and anxious.”
Stoks and Krautkremer agree that over-medication is not necessarily the way they want to treat their patients, no matter the age. Educating families is the first step to healing, they say, so both take a very conservative stance when it comes to medication.
“Therapy is the first-line treatment,” Krautkremer said. “We obviously know there are those situations where kids need medication to help them, especially when it’s affecting their quality of life. Jill and I are very similar in that medication is their last option.”
