psychology services expand with two new providers

Look at any playground and chances are, one in five of the children you see there need help for a mental health issue. Experts say 13 to 20 percent of kids need some sort of mental health guidance or support. It was one of the top three issues facing children identified in Dayton Children’s Community Health Assessment in 2014.

That’s why Dayton Children’s is rapidly expanding its mental health services, with the addition of two new pediatric psychologists- Amanda Beeman, PsyD, and Sandra Todd, PsyD. These two new child psychology experts will allow more children access to much-needed mental health services.

Amanda Beeman, PsyD, recently completed a fellowship at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. She earned her psychology degree at The Ohio State University and her master’s and doctorate at Xavier University. Dr. Beeman completed an internship at the University of Tennessee in Memphis. She specializes in interdisciplinary assessment, including autism spectrum disorders, enhancement of parent-child interactions and treatments for children and adolescents with emotional, behavior and developmental disorders.

Sandra Todd, PsyD, just retired from the United States Air Forces as a lieutenant colonel at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where she was the mental health flight graduate medical education director. In the course of more than 20 years in the Air Force, Dr. Todd led the mental health staff and the psychology residency/internship program at the base, provided mental health services at bases in Texas, Germany and England and served on combat stress control teams in Iraq and Afghanistan. She has authored presentations on autism spectrum disorders, managing the mental health consequences of disaster and behavior management for the treatment of childhood obesity.

The emphasis on pediatric mental health is part of Dayton Children’s Destination 2020 plan to make sure this community’s families have a strong, vibrant children’s hospital close to home. In the past few years, the hospital expanded psychiatry and psychology services, created an autism diagnostic center that drastically reduces the time it takes to get a diagnosis and launched the Mental Health Community Resources Directory - an online searchable directory of many of the mental health resources available in the community.

In the coming year, the Dayton Children's plans to recruit another full-time psychiatrist, expand services of the Mental Health Resource Connection which uses a trained social worker to connect families to local services, and add a practitioner at the Care Clinic, which provides medical care for abused or neglected children.

For more information, contact:
Stacy Porter
Communications specialist
Phone: 937-641-3666
newsroom@childrensdayton.org