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Dr. Valerie Arnold believes she's no different than most women when it comes to balancing the many roles she plays in life.

Which doesn't do justice to the many activities she manages, both professionally and personally.

In a given week, the Memphis psychiatrist splits up her mornings and afternoons to lead research studies, visit troubled children at five public schools, oversee an adolescent sex offender program, teach a course to medical students and residents, and finally, on Fridays, catch up with her friends.

In the midst of a busy career, she's also raised three daughters — Lauren, 20, Mimi, 19, and Sarah, 14. She's shared mutual support with her neurologist husband, Thomas Arnold. She's even honed her green thumb as a master gardener.

With two of her daughters in college now, Arnold has found time to add yet another challenge to her plate this year: taking on the 2007 presidency of the Memphis Medical Society.

The art of gracefully holding it all together is something she learned through observation, years ago.

"I had a good experience in seeing my mother be able to multitask with four children and a busy husband," said Arnold, the daughter of Annabelle Kaplan of Memphis and the late general surgeon Dr. Jerry Kaplan.

Watching how much her father enjoyed his work was an inspiration to follow in his footsteps and pursue a medical career. Her own preference, though, came into focus as she looked more closely into surgery and other options.

"I wanted to work with children, but I ended up deciding I would much rather talk to them than poke on them," Arnold said. "I got much more pleasure trying to work out their problems."

After undergraduate studies at Tulane University and medical school at Meharry Medical College and the University of Alabama-Birmingham, Arnold completed her internship and residency in psychiatry at the University of Tennessee-Memphis. She stayed at UT-Memphis for a two-year fellowship in child psychiatry, which she completed in 1993.

In private practice, she is board certified in psychiatry and board eligible in child psychiatry.

A point of pride for Arnold today is her work with a population she was initially reluctant to treat — sex offenders.

As medical director for the Adolescent Sex Offender Program at Parkwood Behavioral Health System since 2000, she has seen the positive results of long-term residential treatment among young people who would have otherwise continued in the destructive cycle of sexual abuse.

"A vast majority of adults end up re-offending, but that is not true for adolescents," Arnold said. "The data support that the outcome is much better if you treat people when they're adolescents."

The 20-bed Parkwood program rehabilitates young men during about nine months of treatment, while at the same time protecting the community outside.

Since most of the residents are there not voluntarily but by court order, it takes time to simply overcome their denial as a first step, Arnold said.

"I personally don't think you're going to get over this in a week," she said. "But also, a lot of them are so used to lying to themselves and other people."

Adolescent sex offenders were also among the groups she worked with at Youth Villages of Memphis, where she served as a counseling psychiatrist from 1999 to 2002.

As Arnold continues to apply her experience, she's also passing it along to the next generation of professionals as an assistant professor of child psychiatry at UT-Memphis.

Through this appointment, she also serves as a psychiatrist for the Memphis City Schools' Day Treatment Program, a special structured environment for seriously emotionally disturbed students. Her role with the school system takes her to seven different classrooms in five schools.

In her role as a principal investigator for the Memphis office of CNS Healthcare, Arnold keeps one foot in the research side of her specialty. The center conducts clinical trials in support of the development of new drugs to treat psychiatric and neurological diseases and disorders.

For Arnold, one goal in building her multifaceted practice has been to steer it away from the pressures of dealing directly with reluctant payers.

"It used to be, you do a really good job and people know that and you're compensated for it," she said. "It was frustrating for me when I would do a good job with patients — where they even continued to send me Christmas cards every year — and then insurance companies would find a reason not to pay me."

That left her with the dismal options of either having to directly charge patients she knew didn't have the means to pay or else going unpaid herself.

Advocating for physicians being squeezed by insurance companies on one side and malpractice lawsuits on the other is chief among her missions as she takes the helm of the Memphis Medical Society this year.

"I'm really proud to be part of it," she said. "I see it as an organization that tries to do the right thing, when there are so many agendas facing healthcare right now."

Among other causes to champion is the success she's seen in introducing a valued partner to her therapy routine: A Great Pyrenees dog she's training in animal-assisted therapy.

Arnold has submitted a proposal to present her findings of the dog's role in diagnostics at the next meeting of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.

"Animal-assisted therapy has been around for quite some time," she said. "It has been shown to help people live longer and lower blood pressure, but it's never been used as a diagnostic tool."

In fact, she said, watching patients respond to the dog can yield telling information.

"Anxious people will be reticent, will not warm up to the dog, will look flush and will ask me about his biting history," she said. "A depressed child will focus on loss or how he is responsible for his own pet's death."

By the same token, she said, a child with oppositional behavior will try to pull the dog's tail, just to see what it will do. A child with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder will want to run with the dog up and down the hall.

Arnold is now training her second Great Pyrenees — Lolly, a Hanukkah-time gift from her mother. In frequent visits to the Parkwood program, Lolly practices greeting each resident one-by-one and then sitting at Arnold's feet for further instructions.

"You have to pick a dog with a great personality," she said. "That way, you're honing good raw material."

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