“I found myself being a little too empathic. I couldn’t stand to hurt people, to cause them physical pain,” Hollis recalled. “Also, I talked too much! As a medical student, I would spend an awful lot of time just getting to know people … and not just about their disease process that brought them into the hospital, but just them as human beings. So I was realizing that maybe the field I needed to go into was psychiatry.”

Today, Hollis is a board-certified child and adolescent psychiatrist and the regional medical authority for Centerstone’s Davidson County clinics. Centerstone provides behavioral health services at more than 120 facilities throughout Tennessee and Indiana, treating more than 69,000 patients of all ages annually. Hollis divides her time between treating patients and supervising a cadre of nurse practitioners. She spends most of her time at the Centerstone facility in Metro Center.

A graduate of David Lipscomb College, Hollis earned her medical degree at East Tennessee State University, and then headed to the University of Florida in Gainesville for her psychiatry residency. It wasn’t long before she was drawn to the treatment of children. In 1992, her residency complete, she went into private practice with a fellow resident who had finished a year earlier. She opened her own practice soon after that.

With the idea of expanding the scope of her practice, furthering her education or taking a stab at writing, she closed her practice after five years. “I was ready to try some new things,” Hollis said. Then tragedy struck. Her 36-year-old husband died in 1997, the victim of a congenital aortic valve problem.

“You learn a lot when you lose someone close to you. That has impacted me personally but also impacted my understanding of what people go through when they have family in the hospital and when they lose someone,” Hollis said.

It was the medical director of a community mental health service headquartered in Gainesville who eventually lured Hollis back into practice. “You need to get back to work,” he told her, and it was good advice. She started working a few hours a couple of days a week “until I was feeling emotionally stronger,” she said, and she found her niche. She gradually returned to full-time practice, treating children and adolescents at several of the health service’s rural clinics. “I was driving all over the place. Every day of the week, I was in a different location and in Gainesville, too,” she recalled. “I really found my home in community mental health, though. I realized I was just loving it.”

After approximately three years, Hollis decided it was time to return home to Tennessee. With the help of a physician recruiting firm, she landed her position at Centerstone, what she described as a larger version of the community health system where she had been working in Florida. That was in 2000, and Hollis has been with Centerstone since.

“I think, in a way, because I don’t have kids of my own, I tend to feel like all the kids I see are mine,” Hollis acknowledged, adding, “I don’t have a typical day.” She estimated that she sees 15 to 20 patients daily in addition to her supervisory duties. “I see an awful lot of children with pervasive developmental delays and autism, and I see the children who have more complex medical histories, too,” she said.  “I’ve also been around long enough to see that the way we’re viewing these children has changed.”

Hollis recalled when she was in school in Dunlap that students with mental disabilities were in the classroom right alongside the other students, with the teacher struggling to provide the disabled student with additional assistance while also teaching the rest of the class. “We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long way to go, because the human body is so complex and the brain is so complex,” she said.

In 2009, Hollis was chosen as one of 10 providers nationwide by the National Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare to participate in the yearlong Psychiatric Leadership Development Program. “There is no such thing as a training residency for people who are doing this sort of work,” she explained, “and there are so many aspects to improving community mental health and improving the standard of care and working toward evidence-based practices.” The collaboration was extremely beneficial, she said, and it continues among the participants.

Hollis bemoaned the fact that there aren’t enough research dollars flowing into the study of childhood and adolescent mental disorders and medications to treat them. “With children, we’re still having to use a lot of medicines off-label,” she said. “A lot don’t have FDA approval for which there is standard of care because no one has put the money into researching a particular medication to try to push it through the FDA.”

So is research the next stage in her career? “I am always thinking of how I can gather data on the things I’m already doing,” she said. The lab isn’t for her, she explained, then added with a laugh, “I’m a ‘talk-to-people’ kind of person.”

At home, Hollis enjoys the peace and quiet of caring for her four horses and three dogs. “I have my own little space of country out in Mt. Juliet. I just like the tranquility of it,” she said. “You really need another out when you work in a stressful job. It’s important not to take home your stress.”

Spoken like a true psychiatrist.

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