Liz Braun, MSN, CNP, PMHNP-BC
Chief Integration Officer
Connection. This is the word Liz returns to the most when thinking about her clinical work, her role at Elsewhere, and her vision of what it means to be well. Connection to oneself: to body, mind, and spirit. Connection to others: to community, to meaning, to something worth moving toward. As Chief Integration Officer, Liz holds Elsewhere accountable to its core purpose: building an environment where deeper connection—to self, to others, to meaning—becomes possible and lasting.
The dominant medical model is built on disconnection, and in psychiatry, perhaps more than in any other field, it shows its limits. It treats symptoms rather than people, prioritizes the elimination of discomfort over understanding its source, and reduces complex human suffering to diagnostic codes.
Nursing, as a discipline, taught Liz something different: that the whole person is the unit of care, and that the relationship is the intervention. That conviction was shaped early in Liz’s nursing career—through emergency nursing and work as a sexual assault nurse examiner—and carried forward through her training as a board-certified psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioner at Vanderbilt University, advanced training in ketamine-assisted psychotherapy through The Ketamine Training Center under Dr. Phil Wolfson, and certification in psychedelic-assisted therapy through the Integrative Psychiatry Institute. Elsewhere is where a philosophy built on the whole person finally has a home that matches it.
In practice, this means meeting patients where they are—building relationships grounded in safety, honesty, and collaborative choice. It means treating medication as one tool among many, useful for creating enough stability that the deeper work becomes possible. Liz's work—whether in integrative psychiatry or ketamine-assisted psychotherapy—is ultimately about helping people understand what is keeping them stuck and finding a way forward. That is where real change happens and where genuine connection becomes possible.