Lakshmi Ganugapenta came to mental health care through the body first. Before she ever conducted a psychiatric evaluation, she spent years as a Family Nurse Practitioner — in urgent care rooms, at bedsides, treating the physical symptoms that walked through the door. And over time she noticed something that changed the direction of her career: so many of the bodies she was treating were carrying problems that no blood test or X-ray could explain. The anxiety that showed up as chest pain. The depression that presented as fatigue. The trauma that lived in someone's nervous system long after the original wound had closed. She went back to school, earned her Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner certification, and decided to treat the whole person and not just the part that shows up on a chart.

Lakshmi is a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) and Family Nurse Practitioner (FNP-BC) with training from Washburn University and Saginaw Valley State University. She is credentialed through the American Nurses Credentialing Center in psychiatry and brings over a decade of clinical experience across urgent care, family medicine, and inpatient psychiatric settings, including work at Atrium Health and CaroMont Regional Medical Center. That dual training is what makes her approach distinct. She doesn't separate the body from the mind. She was trained in both, and she treats both.

At Healing Pathways Foundation, Lakshmi provides psychiatric evaluations, medication management, and ongoing psychiatric care as part of the Foundation's integrated clinical team. She works alongside therapists and clinicians to ensure that clients who need medication support receive it within the same care ecosystem and not through a referral to a stranger across town who has never read their file. For clients navigating anxiety, depression, PTSD, mood disorders, or the complex overlap of physical and psychiatric symptoms, Lakshmi is the provider who can hold all of it in one appointment because she was trained to see all of it as connected.

She is also building her own practice, Seven Hills Psychiatry, while contracting with Healing Pathways Foundation as a Leader, a decision that reflects both her entrepreneurial spirit and her belief that community-based care and independent practice don't have to be at odds. She brings the same standard to both: care that is rooted in dignity, grounded in medical expertise, and delivered with the kind of soulful attention that treats every patient as a whole person, not a list of symptoms.

Lakshmi does this work because she spent enough years treating the body to know that the body alone is never the whole story.