Karen Canulla MD

Summary

• Dr. Canulla is a board-certified psychiatrist who has spent the last thirty years as a forensic psychiatrist, university faculty, hospital Medical Director, Chief Medical Officer and Critical Access Behavioral Health Department Chair while maintaining a two decades long private psychiatry practice. She has driven innovation in psychiatric practice in multiple settings to improve ethical and conscientious care of these desperately ill patients.
  
  Serious mentally ill patients who were a danger to themselves and others was Dr. Canulla’s first professional position. She evaluated mental illness, prescribed treatment and testified in court regarding the need for the each patient’s court mandated care. She led teams who performed the comprehensive assessment needed to take away a patient’s rights when forced care was found to be necessary. As the Unit Medical Director at an eating disorder hospital, she developed and implemented a structured plan of care for these very ill patients that included innovative medication use, group and family therapy. As Chief Medical Officer of a substance abuse facility, Dr. Canulla wrote and applied protocols for combined inpatient detoxification and medication assisted treatment with continued aggressive outpatient treatment.She helped developed evaluation and treatment protocols for effective and successful ketamine infusions at the Ketamine Infusion Center. She became a founding physician of an integrated therapies center focused on mental illness and pain, incorporating holistic care for the wellness of the whole person. Most recently, Dr. Canulla was the Behavioral Health Department chair in a rural Critical Access Hospital. She developed and ran the first outpatient procedure unit for a rural hospital that provided state of the art psychiatric care modalities while working within the parameters of Medicare/Medicaid.
  She is an Arkansas native who returned during the last three years to care for her mother.