Moller to address mental health

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BROOKINGS – Mary Moller’s career in nursing started as a candy striper while in high school.

While she admitted she liked the uniforms and being part of the Future Nurses of America Club in high school, Moller’s original plan was to be a flight attendant.

“At that time, if you wanted to be a flight attendant, you had to be a nurse,” Moller said, noting nursing was always part of her career plan as her mother, Shirley, and other family members were nurses. “I wanted to do a lot of travel. However, they changed the rule so one didn’t have to be a nurse. I didn’t think of anything different than being a nurse.”

Moller, an associate professor at Pacific Lutheran University’s School of Nursing, will deliver the 2017 College of Nursing Deans’ Distinguished Lecture. Her lecture, “There is No Health Without Mental Health: Our Nation in Crisis,” starts at 7 p.m. March 30 in the University Student Union’s Volstorff Ballroom on campus.

“When I think of psychiatric nursing, I think of Mary Moller,” said Kay Foland, a professor in the college’s West River department. “She’s a phenomenal speaker who has a background in research and teaching and is a former president of the American Psychiatric Nurses Association. She’ll be a great resource for all of us.”

The talk at South Dakota State will add to her list of more than 1,000 professional and research presentations in all 50 states and several nations. Moller will speak in Barcelona later this year at the International Council of Nurses Congress.

Not a bad travel career despite not being a flight attendant.

After earning her bachelor’s degree in nursing, Moller worked as a staff nurse before adding a master’s degree and finding herself in front of the classroom.

“I always liked teaching,” she said. “I got recruited by one of the nursing faculty who said, ‘why don’t you teach? I think you'd be good at it,’” she said. “My career has been responding to what people have asked me to do. I’ve never had a five-year plan in my life.”

She did think of being a midwife but was asked to teach a psychiatric course by Ellen McGovern, the same person who recruited her into teaching.


“I had been teaching neurological nursing in a rehab hospital and ended up teaching psychiatric nursing at a 250-bed county psychiatric hospital,” Moller said. “I quickly realized I was seeing 250 of the most neurologically impaired people I’d ever seen. I was absolutely appalled how they were being cared for … because they weren’t; they were being warehoused.

“They needed rehabilitation, and I started giving the only kind of nursing I knew—rehabilitation nursing. I was doing psychiatric rehabilitation before it was named a specialty,” she continued. “I fell in love with psychiatric nursing because the patients got better. With a rehabilitation approach, there weren’t as many combative incidents, they slept through the night … I realized I was as guilty of as much stigma toward psychiatry as anyone else. I vowed then I’d spend my career combating those attitudes and teaching that the brain is part of the body, too.”

One thing Moller has learned since is “people with mental illness hate having the diagnosis just as much of the rest of society views it. People get confused between mental-health needs and psychiatric illness – everyone on earth has mental-health needs, but thank heaven not everyone has a mental illness,” said Moller, who earned a doctor of nursing practice in 2006, and is also the director of psychiatric services at the Northwest Center of Integrated Health.

“People need to remember that people with mental illness are people first,” she said. “The brain is an organ and just like any other organ; it can be stabilized, it can be repaired.

“I made a commitment I’d go to my grave trying to remove the stigma associated with mental illness, and I do that by teaching and lecturing to anyone who will listen in any venue,” Moller continued. “I try to help people understand mental illness is not because a person has a weak will or character flaw; these are serious, lethal brain disorders.”