What is a Psychological Assessment?
Do you or your child battle with behaviors, emotions, or mental health challenges that you’re struggling to understand? Have you suspected a possible diagnosis of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), or a mood disorder for you or your child? Or are you a primary care physician or therapist looking for providers that offer psychological assessments?
Maybe you have noticed physical, social, and emotional symptoms that have disrupted your or your child’s daily life. Perhaps you waver between low energy and hyperactivity. Or it could be that poor performance at work or school has you wondering if cognitive obstacles are getting in the way of your success.
It’s likely that some degree of social anxiety has impacted your relationships. Maybe you have trouble regulating your moods or struggle with angry outbursts that are out of your control. If this is the case, you may grapple with co-occurring symptoms of anxiety and depression, though you can’t seem to pinpoint the cause of your distress.
Alternatively, you may be a primary care provider or therapist in search of additional support for your clients. Perhaps you’re looking to refer your clients out to a clinician who can perform psychological evaluations. Or maybe you do not feel comfortable prescribing certain medications until you have an accurate diagnosis from a mental health expert trained in psychological testing.
Living with an undiagnosed disorder can make life unnecessarily difficult and isolating. You just want to understand why you or your child behave a certain way so that you can create an effective blueprint for the future. And at Journey Mental Health, our clinicians specialize in psychological assessments that can provide you with the answers you’ve been looking for.
Most Neurological Disorders Are Misidentified And Misunderstood
When it comes to developmental, cognitive, and mood disorders, we as a culture are still very much in the process of effectively understanding and identifying a wide range of conditions. Take an autism diagnosis, for example. Many adults are just now discovering that some of their symptoms and challenges align with a diagnosis of ASD. And women, in particular, are finding out more often than ever that they were misdiagnosed or improperly assessed as children for certain emotional and behavioral issues.
Though it’s great that awareness surrounding these conditions is steadily rising—slowly chipping away at the stigma that has, for decades, obscured the importance of psychological testing—there is still a lot of misinformation and inaccuracy occurring within these diagnoses.
Unfortunately, many providers rely on their own judgment instead of expert evaluators to identify the source of their client’s issues. When this happens in the context of therapy, clients may get stuck during the course of treatment or could even be inaccurately diagnosed. And when diagnosing children, in particular, school systems often insist that a formal assessment is unnecessary even when parents are seeing their child struggle or perform at a level below where they should be.
Yet, psychological evaluations are not meant to invite scrutiny, judgment, or labels, but should be treated as opportunities to understand the neurological and emotional needs of each unique individual. This kind of testing needs to be done by a psychologist (doctoral level) who can provide an accurate diagnosis and resources that can offer additional support.
At Journey Mental Health, we pride ourselves on administering accurate and life-changing psychological assessments to our clients.
Psychological Assessments Are The Key To Understanding What’s Happening Beneath The Surface
In the context of psychological testing, it’s important to find a licensed psychologist who uses verified assessments that have been studied and refined for decades to ensure accurate diagnoses. Because so much information has been collected on a wide variety of populations, these assessments use thousands of data points to create norms that our clinicians use to determine the cause of specific symptoms and challenges.
At Journey Mental Health, there is no referral necessary to receive a psychological assessment. Instead, you would simply need to contact us to schedule an intake session (typically over Zoom), during which we would plan for a more extensive in-person evaluation for either you or your child. The psychological assessment itself will range anywhere from three to eight hours depending on what kinds of tests are required.
Testing is administered by one of our caring, objective, and professional psychologists, who will perform a battery of psychological evaluations to pave the way for a precise diagnosis. From there, an individualized treatment plan—including necessary accommodations—will be created that you can then provide for your employer, therapist, psychiatrist, healthcare provider, or child’s school.
Our psychological assessments are rigorously vetted within the mental health, medical, and scientific communities, and we are committed to providing customized treatment plans that will meet the needs of each individual. When our clients receive a proper diagnosis of a neurological, developmental, or mood disorder, they can get the support they need at home, work, and school so that they can be more productive, successful, and happier in their day-to-day lives.
Moreover, our clinicians are available to provide continued care to those clients looking to mitigate disruptive behaviors and improve their mental health through counseling. Oftentimes, a developmental or neurological diagnosis is accompanied by co-occurring issues of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress, and we are devoted to helping our clients find relief from all of these challenges in their daily lives.
However, we also recognize that many of these individuals have already established a trusted connection with a therapist outside of Journey Mental Health, and we are not interested in removing clients from a treatment trajectory and therapeutic relationship that is working well for them. Instead, we want to ensure other clinicians that psychological assessments can provide clarity and direction for a client to take back to their established therapist and enrich the work they are already doing.
A psychological assessment can provide you with the insight you’ve been looking for. At Journey Mental Health, we view a diagnosis as a point of hope for you and your family—signaling the bridge between frustrating behaviors and a meaningful explanation for the obstacles that have impacted your or your child’s life for too long.
You Can Unlock The Door To A Bright, Hopeful, And More Informed Future
If you suspect that you or your child are struggling with a neurological, developmental, or mood disorder, psychological assessments at Journey Mental Health can provide you with the answers you need to make informed decisions about your future. For more information or to schedule an intake for a psychological evaluation, please call (423) 521-5678 or contact us.