PAUL ARNOLD: CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST, RESEARCHER
Hope may not be a medical term.
But it is what drives Dr. Paul Arnold in both his practice as a child psychologist and his leading-edge research to help traumatized and abused children.
That desire to provide hope and help through science guides his new work, exploring the links of child trauma and brain development.
“A lot of research is looking backward — with adults, looking at their childhood trauma. We are looking forward,” says the 47-yearold, recently appointed head of the University of Calgary’s Mathison Centre for Mental Health Research and Education.
The first phase of the study — in partnership with Calgary’s Sheldon Kennedy Child Advocacy Centre — will follow kids aged six to 17 at the Kennedy centre, the multidisciplinary hub that provides help for abused children. It will look at brain chemistry (through magnetic resonance imaging) and genetics (through DNA), and their relationship to a child’s resiliency to trauma.
Results will hopefully identify brain intervention tools to stem future mental and physical health effects, such as depression, suicide and addictions.
Arnold hopes the study will eventually follow 1,000 kids 10 to 15 years into adulthood — making it unique in “putting all the pieces together.”
It’s no surprise the expert on genetics and neurobiology of childhood psychiatric disorders — formerly head of the anxiety disorders program and director of scientific development and innovation in psychiatry at Toronto’s Hospital for Sick Children — was attracted to a helping profession.
His father was a minister and his mother a social worker for foster children in Ontario; the importance of making a difference was instilled early in him and his two brothers.
As a child, Arnold became interested in genetics and family ancestry, and how the brain’s development “makes us human.”
This year, the father of two boys will continue to offer hope to kids and to those who help them.
“We need to target the right treatment, to the right child, at the right time.”