Richard Lloyd and Norm Snyder likely crossed paths several times growing up in and around Detroit, Mich., but it was several decades before the Vista Health psychiatrists would meet in Fayetteville, Ark., where they are both close colleagues and neighbors. 

 

"We treat the same populations, so we work together closely and consult each other often," Lloyd said. "Plus, he lives across the street from me, so we see the Snyders all the time."

 

Lloyd is president of the medical staff at Vista Health, a comprehensive psychiatric hospital for children, adolescents and adults in Fayetteville, and Snyder is medical director. Both board-certified psychiatrists practiced many years in other states before ending up in Northwest Arkansas in the early- to mid-1990s.

 

Snyder grew up in Southeast Michigan and attended Wayne State University in Detroit, earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy before continuing at Wayne State University College of Medicine, class of 1972. He did a combined, four-year residency in general and child & adolescent psychiatry through Wayne State, went into private practice in Michigan, and within a few years had relocated to the first Fayetteville in which he would live: Fayetteville, N. C.

 

Snyder co-founded a large group and practiced there for much of the 1980s. He joined some colleagues in Phoenix, Ariz. in 1988, but four years later was ready to return to North Carolina. Before finalizing that move, however, a chance recommendation from an administrator piqued his interest in Fayetteville, Ark. He visited, and was hooked immediately.

 

"I absolutely fell in love with the community here," Snyder said. "That was in 1992 and I've been here ever since."

 

He entered private practice in Northwest Arkansas and became director of children's and adolescent services at what was then Charter Vista psychiatric hospital. In 1999, he became medical director and in 2001 moved his private practice to the hospital.

 

Richard Lloyd had joined the team in 1995. Lloyd grew up in Detroit and got a bachelor's in English Literature from the University of Michigan before moving to California to attend Stanford University School of Medicine. He graduated from medical school in 1967, and then did a residency in psychiatry and a fellowship in child psychiatry at UCLA Neuropsychiatric Institute. During the Vietnam War, Lloyd was a Major in the U.S. Air Force, practicing psychiatry for the military at Lowry Air Force Base in Denver, Colo. while finishing his specialty training.

 

After his tour of duty concluded, Lloyd returned to California. The state agreed with Lloyd, so he made a life there in Merced, Calif. as a private practitioner for the next two decades. A changing professional landscape and family attachments in the area eventually drew Lloyd to Fayetteville, Ark.

 

Like Snyder, Lloyd is a big fan of the area.

 

"For me, Fayetteville is really ideal," he said. "It combines the best features of a bigger metropolitan area with the best features of a smaller area. With the university here, there are a lot of cultural things, a lot of good restaurants and shopping, always something to do."

 

Although Lloyd enjoys traveling and working on his 1920s-era home and Snyder is a jazz enthusiast and exhibits his photographic illustrations at local galleries, the nature of their work leaves little time for outside hobbies.

 

Both work extensively with troubled children and adolescents and a smaller number of adult patients, some of whom they have seen through childhood and adolescence. Each sees a varied population at a number of different treatment levels, ranging from acute hospitalization to a residential program, therapeutic day treatment programs and outpatient counseling, maintaining a continuum of care through all the treatment stages.

 

"It is absolutely never dull and never repetitive," Snyder said. "It continues to be challenging because as children grow and develop, so to do the things around them continue to grow and change in the ways they impact them."

 

The work can be intense, since a significant percentage of their young patients come from underprivileged homes where one or both parents may be incarcerated, involved in substance abuse or physical abuse, or have otherwise fractured and dysfunctional home lives that complicate progress towards lasting rehabilitation.

 

Getting every Vista Health patient the care he or she needs, regardless of family life, socio-economic status or insurance plan, is the priority for the medical staff, they said, emphasizing that each patient receives compassionate, physician-driven care for as long as they need it.

 

"We're getting more and more from homes where drug use has been very disruptive in the family. It is difficult to treat those sorts of problems because there are things involved that we don't have control over," Lloyd, a Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association, said. "When we're working with children and adolescents, we're almost always working with the family as well. The people whose families are the most involved are usually the people who do the best."

 

Going forward, the psychiatrists said, Vista Health is looking into developing more family treatment programs to work in tandem with inpatient and outpatient care, as well as more programs for patients in the transitional ages of older adolescence and young adulthood.

 

Snyder said that this illustrates one of the strengths of the now independently owned Vista Health.
"When a need for new services or a change of programs has occurred, we've been able to respond to that a good deal more rapidly than some of the larger institutions or corporations can," he said, adding that Vista Health has been deeply involved in fostering strong collaborative relationships among the disparate institutions that deal with the hospital's patients, from the public schools to the justice system to other healthcare entities and local physicians.

 

"Working together is essential," Snyder said. "These patients need all the collaboration and collective, consistent commitment to their health that we can give."