April Brasher is a board certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner who completed her psychiatric certificate program in May of 2024 at the University of Alabama. She completed a Master’s Degree in Public Health with a concentration in Nursing Education from Jacksonville State University in 2021. In addition, she completed a Bachelor’s of Science in Nursing from Jacksonville State University in 2012. She has always had a passion for working in psychiatry, especially seeing this population during her 10+ years as an ER nurse. She has experience in treating ADHD, ODD, depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, bipolar, and schizoaffective disorders. While she sees populations across the lifespan, her concentration is in the pediatric/adolescent population.
Prior to becoming a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, she worked as an emergency room tech and nurse for over 15 years. While she gained experience in working with this population, it wasn’t until her work as a forensic examiner working at a non-profit women’s shelter where she truly saw the gap between trauma, abuse, and mental health services. She pursued her MSN during her non-profit work and implemented a shelter health clinic as a primary prevention intervention to help eliminate negative health consequences of trauma but gained early access to mental health treatment to reduce risk of depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicidality.
In 2019, she became a board-certified sexual assault examiner (SANE) and was an integral part of opening the first SANE clinic in Shelby County.
She was the recipient of the 2020 Shelby County Healthcare Professional of the Year for her work as a SANE with the expansion into offering domestic violence and strangulation forensic exams, making her program the second in the state to offer this at the time. During her time here, she was able to train over 3,000 law enforcement, judicial officials, state officials, students, and others on trauma informed practice in responding to individuals impacted by violence.
Clinical Affiliations
- Sexual Assault Nurse Examiner – 2016
- Lethality Danger Assessment Certified in 2023
- International Association of Forensic Nurses
- American Nurses Association
- Brookwood Medical Center, Shelby Baptist Medical Center, and Creekside Behavioral Health
- Eastside Mental Health Center, CED, and Learning Tree