Mental Health With Heart

The nation-trotting education and work of new Le Bonheur Chief of Pediatric Psychiatry Alicia Barnes, DO, MPH, found her once on a care team for a young breast cancer patient in another state, an experience that ultimately led her to Le Bonheur Children’s Hospital in Memphis.

The young woman’s diagnosis was poor. She was raising multiple children on her own. That meant she missed treatments to care for them.

“The surgery team, they were very pragmatic about how we’re going to treat this,” said Barnes. “My mind went very quickly to, ‘So, what are the other services that we need to get in place? Who’s going to take care of these children?’”

This experience led Barnes to work at federally qualified health organizations, detention centers and certified community behavioral health centers — places where she could interface with whole families. She said those populations remind her of those served at Le Bonheur outpatient clinics.

Barnes believes in a “wraparound” approach to the mental health of children. It’s a phrase she uses often and putting it to work requires networking, teamwork and — for Barnes at least — wearing many hats and touching many agencies.

Those hats come with three main titles. Barnes is simultaneously Le Bonheur’s chief of Pediatric Psychiatry, the inaugural Urban Child Institute (UCI) Endowed Chair of Excellence for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee (UT) Health Science Center and division director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry at UT Health Science Center. That last title is affiliated with Le Bonheur, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital and the Memphis-Shelby County Schools system.

Alicia Barnes, DO, MPH

Barnes’ first port of call in medicine on the way to Memphis was Anchorage, Alaska. There, she sat about very practically figuring out what she wanted to do after high school.

“I liked working with children and I liked the sciences. I felt that gave me all the tools in the toolbox to treat mental health issues down the line. I didn't know exactly what that meant,” Barnes said. “I just set out on the journey one step at a time with many formative and confirmational experiences along the way.”

Undergrad studies at Knox College in Illinois found Barnes employing another wraparound approach, studying nutritional biological psychology — food, mental health and medical intervention wrapped together. This idea led her to study at Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine (PCOM), residency at Cooper University in New Jersey and general psychiatry work at the now-called Zucker Hillside Hospital in New York and beyond.

All along the way, Barnes believed in the power of professional camaraderie and support. At PCOM, she formed the psychiatry club. From Philadelphia, she’d buy a $20 Megabus ticket for conferences by the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which offered free entry for students. That belief remains. She’s now the president of the Tennessee Society for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry (TSCAP).

A few years ago, Barnes realized she wanted to focus more intentionally on community mental health — that same wraparound approach she’d valued since Philadelphia. This led her to Memphis and the UT Health Science Center for Youth Advocacy and Well-Being. She considers its director, Altha J. Stewart, MD, a “mentor,” one she’d met on one of those long-ago Megabus conference trips. That connection eventually opened the door to her current roles at Le Bonheur and UT Health Science Center.

Urban Child Institute Executive Director Gary Shorb said the goal of their inaugural chair in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry was to enhance clinical care at Le Bonheur and across Shelby County. The endowed chair would also to bring valuable child psychiatry education for teachers, families and caregivers. Finally, the position would leverage the existing strengths of UT Health Science Center, Le Bonheur, the University of Memphis and other collaborators in the community in clinical science and care delivery.

In Memphis, Barnes plans to double down on community mental health by expanding partnerships and training opportunities. For example, her team now works closely with Alliance Health Services, Shelby County’s largest comprehensive behavioral health provider. Beginning this year, Le Bonheur fellows will spend a month at Alliance’s new crisis intervention center to gain firsthand experience with the Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic model.

Barnes also hopes to expand partnerships with Memphis-Shelby County Schools. She wants to work with parents and teachers to understand that bad behavior is often a symptom of something else going on, and “how do we get curious about what that something else is?”

Barnes’ positions at Le Bonheur, UT Health Science Center and TSCAP uniquely position her to help address children’s mental health crisis at both the regional and state levels. Her Le Bonheur role extends her influence beyond Tennessee into Mississippi and Arkansas. She’s particularly energized by the strength and size of Le Bonheur’s psychiatry division.

“To have six child psychiatrists in our division feels like a spoil of riches,” she says. “And for so many of them to be from Memphis — that’s a huge opportunity. It means we can think about community mental health and really having child psychiatrists that are focused on care for the population and being at Le Bonheur.”

For Barnes, that’s the essence of her wraparound philosophy: connecting medicine, community and compassion in a way that treats children not just as patients, but as whole people living in complex families and systems.

Alicia Barnes, DO, MPH

Education and Training

• Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine – Medical School
• Temple University – Master of Public Health
• Cooper University Hospital – General Psychiatry Residency
• Hofstra North Shore Long Island Jewish Hospital – Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Fellowship

Board Certifications

• American Board of Psychiatry and Neurology

Society Membership

• American Academy for Children and Adolescent Psychiatrists
• American Psychiatric Association
• American Medical Association
• Tennessee Medical Association
• Memphis Medical Society
• National Medical Society

Awards and Honors

• Nominee, The Arnold P. Gold Humanism in Medicine Award, St. Louis University School of Medicine
• American Psychiatric Association Nancy Roeske Teaching Award
• New Jersey Psychiatric Association Vice President Recognition Award