CHANGE-MAKER

Driven to improve mental health care, Guy Mattingly Weissinger II, PhD, MPhil, RN, first trained as a therapist, seeing that path as a natural way to impact the lives of others. While he loved helping people on an individual basis, he saw that the nurses he worked with had an even greater reach, engaging with family members, other health care providers and health systems to improve people’s lives in a more holistic sense. He felt called to do more and went on to earn a PhD in Nursing.

Now as the Diane Foley Parrett Endowed Assistant Professor of Nursing in the M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing, Dr. Weissinger draws on his expertise as a therapist and clinical experience as a nurse in home, ER and psychiatric settings to inform his teaching and numerous research projects. With primary care settings now often the first stop for struggling patients, Dr. Weissinger examines the training and resources provided to nurses to ensure they are equipped to not only care for those patients but also support their own mental health. His additional research complements this work by examining how families recognize a need for mental health services, especially regarding suicide risk, and creating evidence-based guidelines for health care institutions in the US and Canada.

“Of course you can make change focusing on a single thing,” says Dr. Weissinger. “However, to me, it's really about implementing the knowledge that we have gained, bringing together a lot of different ideas and boiling them down to make real recommendations and changes that actually affect the world.”