EPISODE SUMMARY
Dr. Erica Joseph grew up on former slave quarters just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with her single-mother and grandparents. Dr. Joseph credits the community-service oriented values instilled by her family, and her time helping with her grandmother’s chronic diabetes, for guiding her towards a career in health care. Today, Dr. Joseph, is a DNP and Ph.D. trained psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and scientist serving as Intensive Case Management (MHICM) Co-Lead at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System.
EPISODE NOTES
Dr. Erica Joseph grew up on the Allendale Plantation (former slave quarters) in Port Allen, just outside Baton Rouge, Louisiana, with her single-mother and grandparents. They made their living as sharecroppers picking cotton in a rural community where modern health care was inaccessible and folk relied on home remedies to treat most ailments. (Sharecropping is a type of farming in which families rent small plots of land from a landowner in return for a portion of their crop, to be given to the landowner at the end of each year.)
Dr. Joseph’s grandmother was particularly adept as a healer, sharing her knowledge and skills for the good of the community. In her later years, however, the impact of chronic diabetes, which remained undiagnosed and without appropriate treatment until it was too late, forced the amputation of her grandmother’s legs.
Dr. Joseph credits the community-service oriented values instilled by her family, and her time helping with her grandmother’s care, for guiding her towards a career in health care. The realization that had her grandmother been diagnosed and received care sooner she might not have lost her legs, provided additional motivation to focus on improving access to health care in marginalized communities.
Today, SAMHSA Minority Fellowship Program at the American Nurses Association alumni, Dr. Erica Joseph, is a DNP and Ph.D. trained psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner and scientist serving as Intensive Case Management (MHICM) Co-Lead at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Healthcare System. Her research interests include suicide prevention and examining the risk and protective factors of suicide among African American veterans, which comes at a critical moment with suicide rates among African American youth and men on the rise.
Dr. Joseph continues to build on the community service legacy of her family by providing increasingly in-demand counseling and mental health awareness promotion in the parishes of rural Louisiana. She remains a stalwart advocate for ending health care disparities, and has contributed to the National Commission to Address Racism in Nursing
Tune in to Season 2, Episode 12 of Mental Health Trailblazers, Psychiatric Nurses Speak Up! to hear Dr. Erica Joseph’s triumphant story of grit, resilience, and fortitude that propelled a young girl growing up on a former slave plantation to becoming an accomplished psychiatric mental health nurse scientist making a difference for marginalized groups, including America’s war-hero veterans, in her community and beyond.
You can learn more about Dr. Erica Joseph at https://emfp.org/mfp-fellows/erica-joseph.