Clinical Assessments

Clinical assessments help individuals gently navigate their feelings, personality, and emotional hurdles, setting the stage for nurturing and supportive interventions.

What Is clinical Assessment?

Clinical assessment is a process used by mental health professionals, primarily trained clinical psychologists, that involves the use of assessment tools such as interviews, tests, and observations in the evaluation of clients. An assessment allows a better understanding of how a person thinks, learns, feels and behaves. The main purpose of clinical assessments is to help psychologists diagnose their clients when they present with a problem and are looking for greater clarity around their struggles. Identifying if the client has a mental health struggle helps to inform the treatment that they may require, including what type of intervention or counselling may be most appropriate based on their symptoms and/or struggles.

Why Are Clinical Assessment Needed?

Mental health presents with a variety of “behavioral, emotional, or physical discomfort that is often difficult for a clinical practitioner to understand initially.

Usually, in mental health settings, a clinical psychologist attempts to understand the nature and extent of the client’s problem by a process of inquiry that is similar to the way a detective might approach a case by collecting evidence and using inductive and deductive logic to focus on the most likely factors.

Assessment of mental disorders is usually more difficult, more uncertain, and more protracted than it is for evaluation of many physical diseases. Yet, early assessment of mental health problems is extremely important in clinical practice. No rational, specific treatment plan can be instituted without at least some general notion of what problems need to be addressed.

When you should get a clinical assessment?

If you have been seeing a therapist for a while and feel like progress is not being made a clinical assessment may be beneficial. This involves gathering information and making conclusions through observation, psychological and neurological tests, and interviews to identify the client’s issues and symptoms. The process includes evaluating the client’s skills, abilities, personality traits, cognitive and emotional functioning, social context (such as environmental stressors), and cultural factors, including language or ethnicity.

Understanding

the Clinical Assessment Process

When completing an assessment, the following processes occur:

1. Advanced Cognitive Abilities:
2. Choosing a battery of tests
3. Administering, scoring, and interpreting tests
4. Integrating and conceptualizing information gathered from test results, the clinical interview, behavioural observations, and other sources
5. Writing a psychological assessment report
6. Providing feedback to the individual assessed

Depending on the information, a diagnosis may or not be provided based upon the alignment of symptoms to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM-V) https://psychiatry.org/psychiatrists/practice/dsm

Why Consider a Clinical Assessment?

There are many reasons why an adult might need a clinical assessment. Some adults may have never been assessed before, but they are experiencing difficulties in their life that they cannot explain. Other adults may have been assessed as children, but their needs have changed over time and they would like to update their assessment.

When a Clinical Assessment Might Be Beneficial

Instances where a clinical assessment may be of value to an individual:

Complex presentation of symptoms.
Client is looking for more certainty on what their struggles may be and what type of counselling and intervention may be most appropriate,
Client feels like interventions and medication are not helping and a holistic overview may help provide better insight to the client,
Suspected mental health concerns: A person may experience symptoms related to conditions such as depression, anxiety, ADHD, or personality disorders and seek an assessment to confirm a diagnosis and receive personalized treatment recommendations.
Difficulty functioning in daily life: Challenges in managing day-to-day activities, whether at work, school, or in personal relationships, may lead someone to pursue an assessment to uncover the causes—such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, or other DSM-IV-TR diagnoses—and find effective strategies for improvement.
Changes in behavior or mood: A person who notices significant changes in mood or behavior, such as heightened irritability, difficulty sleeping, or emotional instability, may seek an assessment to identify whether conditions like mood disorders, personality disorders, or other DSM-IV-TR diagnoses are contributing to these changes and learn how to address them.

Ruling out medical causes

Many psychologists who engage in clinical assessment will recommend a physical examination, including blood work, before starting a clinical assessment. Why? Some medical conditions, like hyperthyroidism or hormonal imbalances, can present symptoms similar to mental health disorders. By ruling out these physical causes, unnecessary treatments or therapies can be avoided, ensuring the right course of care. If you do not have a family doctor or would like to be part of our team-based approach to wellness, please book in with our nurse practitioner to rule out medical causes that may be a source of your concern.