Some seasons of life make your own mind feel like a stranger. A new baby and a sadness you cannot explain. A relationship with food that has quietly taken over your thoughts. A perimenopausal shift that turns calm into rage you do not recognize. Allison Santacroce, a board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP-BC) at Axis Integrated Mental Health, treats the parts of mental health that women are too often told to push through. She combines years of frontline psychiatric nursing with specialized training in eating disorders and, Allison is passionate about perinatal and women’s mental health, an area she believes is still badly under-researched. She holds experience in postpartum nursing, and believes in meeting patient exactly where they are in their healing journey.

Can You Treat Depression During Pregnancy?

Yes, perinatal depression affects 1 in 5 women and often arrive alongside anxiety, OCD, or trauma, and they frequently surface during the very life stages when women are most vulnerable, including pregnancy and the months after birth. Yet, many providers never even ask if a pregnant women is depressed, which leaves patients even more vulnerable in the post-partum period. Allison built her career asking the right questions, even if the answer was “it’s complicated”. At Eating Recovery Center, she managed psychiatric care for patients facing eating disorders together with depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress, substance use, and bipolar disorder, often all at once. That means she can hold the whole picture, including the questions most women are afraid to ask, like whether it is safe to treat depression while pregnant or nursing. The answer is almost always yes, and the safest path is a provider who understands medication management, the treatments beyond meds, and the moment.

Clinical Approach

Allison practices evidence-based psychiatry with a strong respect for readiness. She lived abroad for a time and remembers how hard it was to learn a new language and culture, and how much it mattered that people were patient and met her where she was. That experience shapes how she treats. She does not push a plan you are not ready for. She builds one with you. Every visit starts with a thorough history and assessment, then moves toward an individualized plan that may include diagnostic testing, careful medication management, education, and clear next steps. When standard antidepressants are not enough, Allison is comfortable with interventional options. She has hands-on experience with ketamine therapy, and at Axis she can guide patients toward Spravato (esketamine) and Deep TMS, a drug-free treatment that uses BrainsWay H-Coil technology to reach the brain networks involved in depression. This is care that goes beyond medication when medication alone is not working, not instead of it.

Who Allison Helps

Allison works with adults across the full range of psychiatric conditions in-person in our Louisville Clinic and across Colorado via telehealth, and she has particular depth in a few areas where women are often underserved. She helps people living with depression and anxiety, including treatment-resistant depression that has not responded to past medications. She focuses on women’s depression treatment at every stage of life, including postpartum depression and the mood shifts of perimenopause, including the irritability and rage that many women are surprised to feel and ashamed to name. She treats eating disorders alongside the conditions that travel with them, such as OCD, PTSD, substance use, and bipolar disorder. If you have felt dismissed, rushed, or handed a prescription without a conversation, you are the person Allison built her practice for.

Background and Credentials

Allison earned her Master of Science in Psychiatric Mental Health Nursing from Allen College in Iowa and is board certified as a PMHNP through the American Nurses Credentialing Center (ANCC). Before becoming a nurse practitioner, she worked as an inpatient psychiatric nurse, including time on a child and adolescent psychiatry unit, where she managed crisis situations, withdrawal, and medication across many routes of care. Her graduate clinical training spanned inpatient psychiatric units, outpatient clinics, detox settings, and skilled nursing facilities, giving her experience with psychiatric conditions across the lifespan. Since 2023 she has practiced as a PMHNP at Eating Recovery Center in Denver. She also holds an undergraduate degree in biology, which grounds her in the science behind the medications and treatments she uses.

Why This Work Matters to Her

Allison came to mental health after watching it affect the people she loved. She saw how often friends and family struggled quietly, and she wanted to be the person who actually listened. Listening is the thing people who know her say she does best. She believes one of the most powerful things any of us can do for our mental health is build a real support system through family, friends, and community, and she carries that belief into every plan she writes. Florence Nightingale is the historical figure she would most want to share a meal with, which tells you something about the tradition of careful, humane nursing she sees herself part of.

Ready to Start?

You do not have to have the right words or a tidy story to make an appointment. You just have to be ready to be heard. Allison is accepting new patients at the Axis Integrated Mental Health psychiatric clinic in Westminster, Colorado. Call us or request an appointment online, and our team will help you find a time that works and confirm your insurance before your first visit.