I'm Brianna Dawson

I’m a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner specializing in women’s mental health, with advanced training in perinatal psychiatry, integrative and reproductive psychiatry, and hormone-informed care. My work focuses on pregnancy, postpartum, PMDD, and perimenopause—times when many women are told “this is normal” while quietly struggling to feel like themselves.

My path into psychiatry started early. I knew I wanted to be a nurse by the time I was nine. I initially thought I would work in maternity care, but everything shifted during a psychiatric rotation in nursing school. I was drawn to the complexity of the brain, the patterns behind behavior, and the opportunity to truly understand what someone is experiencing beneath the surface. I started working in psychiatry alongside my first nursing role and never left.

Over the next several years, I worked across inpatient units, crisis settings, and community mental health with children, adolescents, and adults. Those environments taught me how much people want to be understood—and how often they are not. They also showed me the limits of a system built around volume, where care is rushed, treatment is standardized, and important factors like hormones, lifestyle, and biology are often overlooked.

As a psychiatric nurse practitioner, I expanded my ability to help women through medication management—but I quickly realized that medication alone wasn’t enough for many of the women I was seeing. Women were being told their symptoms were “just hormones” without any real explanation. Others were given prescriptions without understanding why they felt the way they did. Many were left trying to function through anxiety, mood changes, poor sleep, and burnout without a clear plan.

That gap in care is what led me to build my private practice.
I approach psychiatry differently. I don’t stop at symptoms. I look at the full picture—your mental health history, your daily life, your sleep, your stress, your relationships, your hormones, and your biology—to understand what is actually driving how you feel. I use targeted lab testing to gather more data so we’re not guessing. From there, we create a plan that is specific to you, not based on a one-size-fits-all model.

I believe women should be listened to when they say something feels off. I believe hormone shifts should always be considered. I believe you deserve to understand what’s happening in your body instead of being given vague or dismissive answers. And I believe that when we take the time to get this right, the outcomes are different.

I’ve seen women go from feeling constantly overwhelmed, anxious, and disconnected from themselves to feeling clear, steady, and more in control of their day-to-day lives. I’ve seen improvements in sleep, energy, focus, and relationships. I’ve seen women start to feel like themselves again—and in many cases, better than they have in years.

One moment that reinforced this approach was working with a patient who had been severely depressed despite trying multiple medications. When we looked deeper through lab testing, it became clear that her hormone levels were significantly low. Once we addressed that, everything changed—her mood improved, her energy returned, her relationships strengthened, and she was able to re-engage with her life in a way that hadn’t been possible before. That’s the difference that comes from understanding the full picture.

My patients often tell me that working together feels different. They feel listened to. They feel understood. They’re surprised by how collaborative the process is and how much clarity they gain about what’s actually going on. My style is warm and conversational, but also direct. I’ll tell you what I’m seeing, explain why it matters, and help you move forward with a clear plan.