26. Practicing Without Distance: Building Child & Adolescent Psychiatry in Rural America | Dr. Martha Karlstad
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Karlstad, a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist who has spent over a decade building mental health infrastructure in rural southwest Wisconsin. As the first mental health professional ever hired within her independent health system—a federally designated rural health clinic serving a five-county region from a town of just 5,000—Dr. Karlstad has built a behavioral health department from the ground up. What began as a single role has grown into an integrated team of a general psychiatrist, a psychiatric nurse practitioner, four psychotherapists, and dedicated nursing staff, all embedded within primary care.
Beyond her clinical work, Dr. Karlstad serves as a consultant with the Wisconsin Child Psychiatry Consultation Program (CPCP), a statewide psychiatric access initiative that connects primary care providers with real-time child psychiatry support. Through this role, she extends her reach to thousands of pediatric patients she may never meet, equipping frontline clinicians who carry the bulk of youth mental health care. She is also the president-elect of the Wisconsin Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (WISCCAP), where she is helping lead efforts in legislative advocacy—focusing on Medicaid access, reimbursement, and sustaining care for children with severe and persistent mental illness.
This conversation traces Dr. Karlstad’s path into psychiatry—from early aspirations in international primary care to a pivotal third-year rotation—and explores how her commitment to high-need, low-resource populations led her to one of the most underserved regions in rural America. She speaks candidly about the realities of practicing in settings where specialized care may require hours of travel, and where even basic treatments—such as medication-assisted therapy—can demand extraordinary burdens from families.
Her clinical philosophy is grounded in evidence-based practice and collaborative decision-making with families, with an emphasis on transparency—especially when options are limited.
Most powerfully, Dr. Karlstad reflects on the personal cost of rural practice: the loss of anonymity, the complexity of boundaries in tightly knit communities, and the weight of losing a young patient to suicide in a place where professional and personal lives are inseparable. She reframes burnout not as a single breaking point, but as “death by a thousand cuts,” and shares how diversifying her roles, pursuing her own therapy, and committing to personal growth allowed her to move from questioning the sustainability of this work to believing she can do it for a lifetime.
This episode is essential listening for trainees and early-career psychiatrists considering rural or underserved practice—and for anyone wrestling with the intersection of professional identity, community, and systemic responsibility. Dr. Karlstad offers a rare and unfiltered look at what it truly means to build a career—and a life—where the need is greatest.
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