In the Spotlight: J’Andra Antisdel
J’Andra Antisdel is an assistant professor of nursing science, teaching undergraduate and graduate courses in mental health and health informatics. A mental health nurse since 2005, she has been teaching since 2019. In early 2025, Antisdel was recognized by the Midwest Nursing Research Society (MNRS) for her research on cyber victimization. This significant achievement distinguishes Antisdel as a national leader in the field of mental health nursing. In May, she received the Karen Bush Schneider Faculty Scholarship Award from Saint Mary’s for her commitment to psychiatric mental health and the quality of life of individuals with chronic health conditions.
How did you choose the mental health field as your speciality?
My mother was diagnosed with a mental illness when I was young and that shaped a lot of my life. A lot of mental illness was undiagnosed back then, especially among the Black community. There was a stigma related to mental illness; that you just needed to act right or go to church, or you just got the evil spirit inside of you. Growing up, we heard that a lot, or we didn’t discuss it at all. And so when I started getting into psychology and reading, I became fascinated with mental illness and mental health. It was the reason that I chose nursing as a profession.
Your path to Saint Mary’s was circuitous …
I was one of the first to go to college in my family. I got my associate’s degree from Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne (now Purdue University Fort Wayne) in 2002, and for 12 years, I worked as an RN in mental health nursing. In 2013, I was working for Memorial Epworth, a behavioral hospital in South Bend. They developed a program to encourage their nurses to get their bachelor’s degrees. I took advantage of it, and enrolled at IU South Bend.
What changed for you then?
My world expanded! I took a research class when I was getting my bachelor’s degree. My professor asked us to make a poster based on our project. She asked me to submit mine to a conference for the Midwest Nursing Research Society. I had no idea what that was—I couldn’t imagine anything I would do would be what they wanted—but it got accepted and I went to Milwaukee. I loved it. It was around then that another professor told me I should teach. Again, it was something so foreign, something other people could do, but not me. So after I finished my BSN, I went back to work at Epworth for several more years.
Yet, what that professor said stuck with me, even though I tried to deny it. At the urging of a co-worker who could see I was ready to do more, I applied to Bethel College for my master’s in nursing education. In 2019, while I was finishing, an adjunct position opened at IUSB, which gave me the opportunity to teach, which really started putting it all together for me. While I was there, I met Cibele Webb (director of Saint Mary’s BSN program) who encouraged me to get my Ph.D. which would open even more doors as a professor. That same voice came back, telling me it wasn’t something I could do, but in 2020, I was accepted at IU Indianapolis with a full ride scholarship. That fall, while I was working through my Ph.D., at Cibele’s urging, I started teaching at Saint Mary’s.
What do you hope students take away from a course with you?
I’ve had former students tell me about experiences where they’ve applied what I’ve taught them. Other students have told me how they were able to advocate for their mental health patients. Many people don’t know how to talk to mental health patients, so one of the real things about my class is to give them an experience where they can build empathy. We have class exercises where we put them in the shoes of someone in crisis. For example, we have an exercise where we do a hallucination simulation. The students experience what it’s like to hear voices. It’s completely voluntary, of course, but most of the students do it and come away with a much better understanding of what people go through. I want them to understand that people with mental health issues are not only struggling with their illness but also struggling with how people perceive them and how people treat them.
What is your classroom dynamic?
There is a different level of respect here. There’s this camaraderie among Saint Mary’s nursing students. They definitely are in their environment. And I love that. The students here are very prepared and I don’t feel like I have to spend a lot of time breaking down preconceived notions.
How does your class on health informatics and data analytics fit into this?
It is my intention to prepare our Doctor of Nursing Practice students for clinical decision making systems that they work with in the field. With electronic medical records, it’s not just knowing what they are, but they should know the policy and legislation behind them. I am also really big on cyber security and what practitioners have to know when there is a breach. In my class, students role play how it happened, how they’re going to prevent it, and what they’re going to do to protect people. Then I have them collect their own data and build a survey, do visualizations, statistical analysis, and write a paper about their project. They work on this all year.
What has been a highlight of your teaching career?
When students tell me how they advocated for patients who were experiencing stigma. For example, if the patient is a confused elderly woman who walks into the ER, some providers will assume she has dementia and look no further. But she might have a UTI. And what happens when an elderly woman who does have dementia tells you she’s pregnant. My students and I talk about situations like this. What might that mean? It might mean that the patient is experiencing symptoms that remind them of when they were pregnant and this is how they know to tell you. I help my students to listen and not be dismissive. A lot of students tell me about situations that have happened like this, where they’ve listened and were able to see and hear things from their patient that other people had not.
What are your future aspirations in and outside of the classroom?
I have been accepted into a post-doctorate program at IU based on my research in cyber victimization. In addition to my teaching here, my post-doc project is to develop an instrument that identifies risk for teens who have experienced cyber victimization. Sextortion, human trafficking, teens who have been solicited online…these are all risks. I’m looking to create an instrument to identify teens who might do something that might harm themselves. This project is an opportunity to work with a mentor and develop a program of research and hopefully come up with some measurable results. There is a section in mental health nursing on victimization—sexual assault and domestic violence—but cyber victimization is not there. I hope to change that. ‖