Assessment
Assessment Types
- Mood and Personality Disorders
- QEEG – see more (link to QEED page
- Autism (Aspergers) – specialising in female HFA presentation
- ADHD
- IQ/Learning Assessment
- Workplace and Career
- Personality inventories
- Learning Styles
- Medico-Legal Assessment
Comprehensive Assessment Steps
- Intake & booking – may be done online or by telephone
- Background screening – Online psychological questionnaires and forms.
- Initial interview – Meet with a clinician or our team to plan for assessment and discuss goals.
- Assessment – Identify the root cause of any cognitive, learning, social, emotional or behavioural issues. This may include technologically based screening
- Feedback session – Go through the results, areas that need treating, and follow-up recommendations.
- Report – report if needed outlining your profile, any diagnoses, recommended follow-up, and strategies to manage weaknesses at home and work.
- Employment advisory – Where requested you may wish to receive an advisory you can choose to share with an employer for additional short or long term support
- Family team support – Where appropriate and desired, our clinicians are able to meet with family and/or employers to provide a full spectrum of support and intervention strategies.
- Intervention / Therapy program/s
- A complete therapy plan to address all areas of need including: psychological therapy, cognitive training, or other learning or skills training.
General Costs for Assessment
To administer all available cognitive tests would prove extremely time-consuming and costly. At Mental Health Spot P&P we tailor and select assessment process unique to your situation. One way to do this is base an assessment on self-reported difficulties and current behaviours.
Although IQ and ability tests can be part of the cognitive assessment process, they should not be considered “the assessment” as they may not identify the underlying issues that may need addressing. Additionally, evidence-based questionnaires are helpful but alone may entirely insufficient to measure many presentations – such as ADHD and Autistic Spectrum.
ADHD assessments for example may benefit from the inclusion of brainwave scans, however these should never be used as a diagnostic as stated by the authors and creators of QEEG normed databases. ADHD is a cognitive condition that is possibly evidenced by differential brainwave activity, however many other factors need to be considered, along with differential diagnosis that may need to be considered and ruled out alongside any diagnostic protocol.
Additionally, research demonstrates that 1:8 females with ASD (or “Aspergers”) are either misdiagnosed or not diagnosed at all by teaching, medical or allied health professionals. In adult females Autism can be misdiagnosed as or possibly lead to anxiety (social, GAD), depression, eating disorders, self harm, Borderline Personality / Bipolar, adjustment disorders, OCD and other conditions.
This is a scary thought for a cognitive style where awareness can lead to wonderful progressions in treatment and indeed life.
Assessments should include strategies for developing both strengths and weaknesses, over the short and long term. Interventions should work with people as ‘human beings’ too. Feelings of self-doubt, anxiety and stress can impede any other more cognitively focused strategies, so at Mental Health Spot we work with you to create an environment for success.
Examples of some of the assessment components we may use;
- Intellectual functioning: verbal reasoning, nonverbal reasoning, working memory, processing speed
- Reading accuracy, reading speed & reading comprehension
- Spelling & writing
- Phonological Awareness: blending, segmentation, rapid naming, phonological memory, non-word reading
- Mathematical operations and reasoning
- Memory: visual & verbal memory, immediate and delayed memory, recognition memory
- Attention: visual sustained attention, auditory sustained attention, switching attention, divided attention, selective attention
- Attention/ memory span: auditory & visual
- Impulsivity & stimulation (boredom) levels- to both auditory and visual information
- Executive functioning: planning, organisation, abstract reasoning, self-monitoring, utilising feedback
- Processing speed: visual and auditory
- Cognitive flexibility
- Visual processing: discrimination, figure-ground, spatial skills, closure, form constancy
- Auditory processing: discrimination, figure-ground, filtered hearing, ear dominance
- Psychological issues: depression, anxiety, anger/frustration, aggression, self-esteem
- Type and nature of evident ‘Social’ skills