When Kortnie Lynch talks about addiction, she isn’t speaking from a textbook.

She’s speaking from experience.

A board-certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner, Kortnie now leads Next Right Thing Behavioral Health in Mount Dora, specializing in addiction medicine, psychiatric care and medication-assisted treatment. But years before opening her own practice, she found herself battling opioid addiction while working as a nurse.

“I completely destroyed my whole life,” Kortnie says.

Her addiction ultimately cost her nursing license. Rather than walking away from the profession, she fought to earn it back.

“I kind of clawed my way back,” she says.

After regaining her license, Kortnie completed a nurse monitoring program and eventually spent eight years working with that same program, helping other nurses navigate recovery while continuing to practice safely.

“It’s a labor of love,” she says.

Kortnie later worked as a nurse practitioner providing outpatient addiction treatment before returning to inpatient care. She said leaving her outpatient patients behind wasn’t an option.

“I felt really bad leaving the outpatient setting,” she says. “I felt like the patients that I had, I had to still treat them. I couldn’t just walk away from them.”

That decision led her to open a small office in Mount Dora so she could continue caring for those patients. What began as a single office has quickly grown into Next Right Thing Behavioral Health.

“We’ve grown really fast because I think what we have is kind of special,” she says.

Today, Kortnie treats patients experiencing addiction, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, ADHD and other mental health conditions. She says addiction and mental illness often go hand in hand and believes understanding a patient’s experience is essential to helping them recover.

“The reason I’m good at what I do is because I’ve been through it,” she says.

Kortnie says many people struggling with addiction or mental illness face stigma that can make seeking help even more difficult.

“There’s no suffering like mental illness,” she says. “Because if people don’t understand it, they don’t need the judgment.”

Instead, she believes recovery begins with compassion.

“When in doubt, go help others,” she says. “If you’re feeling low then you need to go help others.”

Although Next Right Thing Behavioral Health has grown primarily through word of mouth, Kortnie says the practice’s success comes from making patients feel seen rather than judged.

“We have a full practice because the patients feel good here,” she says.

Her journey from addiction to recovery continues to shape the way she approaches every patient who walks through the door.

“When you have come so close to the end,” Kortnie says, “that’s when you can crawl out of it and really help others.”

For more information, visit nextrightthingmtdora.com.