Dr. Bettis

Dr. Alex Bettis, is a licensed clinical psychologist in Tennessee, and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at VUMC.

Dr. Bettis earned her PhD in clinical psychology from Vanderbilt University in 2018. She completed her clinical internship at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, and her postdoctoral fellowship training was funded by an NIMH T32 through the Alpert Medical School of Brown University.

Dr. Bettis's research focuses on the role of coping, emotion regulation, and stress in risk for and the prevention of depression and suicide among adolescents. Dr. Bettis has received funding from APA Division 53, the American Psychological Foundation, the Klingenstein Third Generation Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health for her work. She is currently funded by an NIMH K23 award, investigating the role of flexible emotion regulation in predicting short-term suicide risk among psychiatrically hospitalized adolescents. Dr. Bettis's current KTGF fellowship award seeks to develop a mobile health intervention for parents of teens who visit the emergency department for a psychiatric evaluation that will target both access to care and parents' self-efficacy managing their child's mental health crises. 

Dr. Bettis's clinical expertise is in the treatment of depression, anxiety, OCD, and trauma-related disorders in children and adolescents, and she has extensive experience managing suicidality and self-harm among youth with these psychiatric conditions.