The Origins of Ascent
Hello and welcome to Ascent Mental Health. My name is Karl Tucker and I am the owner of Ascent Mental Health. I have worked in the therapeutic world for many years, and each experience has taught me valuable life lessons that I channel into the growth of Ascent.
In my early 20s, as I tried to figure out what I wanted to pursue as a career, I started at a wilderness program for at-risk youth. I always loved backpacking and looked at working for a wilderness program as a fun way to see if I wanted a career working with teens. I knew I wanted to choose a career that I enjoyed. While I managed to navigate adolescence without any major speed bumps, many of my friends struggled with drugs and other common teenage pitfalls. One of my best friends had been a student at the Anasazi Foundation in Arizona. He said it was a good program and that he would be moving to Arizona soon. The plan was to live with my friend and spend every other week in the wilderness. Sadly, my friend died of an overdose the night before he was supposed to be entering a drug treatment center. It would have been his third such attempt. His decade-long battle for sobriety came to a tragic conclusion. His death galvanized a belief in the incredible potential of young people, and how heartbreaking it is to see it lost. So, I started my tenure at Anasazi with a heavy heart and a renewed desire to help those that I was able to help. My time at Anasazi was undeniably the most influential experience of my life. It helped me form some of my deepest-held core beliefs about how to see, understand, and interact with others. In my personal life, these principles have been nothing short of life-saving. Anasazi began a 20-year obsession with learning everything I could about self-deception, shame, victimhood, and justification.
After Anasazi, I had a short stint working at a treatment center for youth sex offenders. The most powerful part of working with this population was attempting to apply the values I had embraced at Anasazi. I had been taught that unless you could see people as people (having hopes and dreams and fears as real as your own), your ability to invite meaningful change in others is essentially non-existent. At Anasazi, we were encouraged to not read the students' history because it may hamper our ability to form a relationship. Working with sex offenders you not only know their history, but you also know that it is heinous in nature. It was only after I learned that every one of these children, these sex offenders, had themselves been victims of abuse that I was able to see them honestly.
I then spent 5 years helping at a residential treatment center for teenage girls called New Haven. On average the students at New Haven were there for 8 to 12 months. I loved working with that population and with that company. It allowed me to practice another principle I came to value at Anasazi: I am not the healer. We do not have the ability to fix others, all we can do is walk with them. New Haven taught me to walk quietly with others and learn how to love them both in and out of their struggles. While working for New Haven, I completed a nursing degree. When I received my nursing license I got a job at the Utah State Hospital as a psychiatric nurse, where I worked for almost 5 years. Working for the Utah State Hospital I had exposure to the most serious forms of mental illness. This taught me patience and understanding for those who are not in control of their own mind.
I moved on from the Utah State Hospital to work as a nurse in the Neuro ICU. This job was an education in vulnerability. These patients often had vitality and autonomy ripped from them and as a nurse, it was my job to step into that struggle with them and do everything in my power to help them regain what they had lost. Being allowed to walk with others as they struggle is a sacred place to walk.
From the Neuro ICU, my heart was turned back towards the therapeutic world where I had come to find I was most suited. I decided to attend the Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner program at the University of Utah. The pursuit of this goal produced some of the happiest years of my life.
Upon graduation, I grew in my desire to provide the highest level of care possible to my patients. Ascent Mental Health was formed in the ongoing pursuit of that goal. As the owner, its success and failures rest solely on my shoulders. While this can feel daunting at times, it is also empowering. My passion for this work flows from gratitude. All that I am, everything I have is the product of the help I have received along the way. I should not be where I am today. I do not deserve it and I did not earn it. As such, I have acquired a debt I cannot repay. All I can do is try to help others as others have helped.
Welcome to the Ascent Mental Health Family.
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Karl Tucker, PMHNP-BC, DNP
