What is Psychological Evaluation?
Your personalized psychological evaluation from DFW Assessment may include a range of tests and assessment tools used to help psychologists and other mental health and medical professionals better understand your behaviors. Perhaps more importantly, these assessments can also help you better understand your own strengths and weaknesses. Psychological evaluations can work as problem solving tools for patients who need to better understand their behaviors; refine their therapy goals; and meet challenges in personal, professional, and educational settings.
Who Should Receive Psychological Evaluation?
Some common reasons people reach out to us to schedule testing for themselves or a loved one include:
- Anxiety – Feeling anxious in certain situations is a perfectly natural emotional response, but for people with an anxiety disorder, these feelings may not go away, become worse over time, or are heightened in certain situations.
- Depression –Symptoms may include feeling discouraged, sad, hopeless, unmotivated, or disinterested, as well as struggling to perform your regular, daily activities.
- Difficulty regulating mood – This may be any combination of behavioral changes that seem to occur and linger without your being able to redirect your emotions. Again, people experience periods of time where it is more difficult to regulate moods, but if these times are constant or begin to interfere with your ability to lead a healthy, happy, or productive day to day life, you may need to seek diagnosis and treatment.
- Oppositionality – This can be more difficult to define for many people, especially teens and young adults who are establishing independence and may naturally express some of these characteristics. However, like other concerns, this condition becomes problematic when the oppositionality is constant, leads to violence, or impedes success in personal, educational, or professional settings.
It’s important to remember that psychological conditions are just as real and detrimental to health as physical conditions, but they are also just as treatable. You should feel comfortable reaching out to our expert team for help diagnosing these conditions and finding appropriate therapies that will work for you. We can help you understand and address any psychological concerns. Psychological evaluations may also be used to help those already engaging in therapy to receive necessary clarification to help them improve their treatment goals.
What Kind of Testing is Involved?
Psychological testing from the team at DFW Assessment may include a variety of evaluative measures. Our team always creates personalized assessment plans. Assessment methods may include written tests, rating scales, and computerized testing instrument that evaluate strengths and weaknesses in cognitive, academic, and behavioral function. Our team members may also use behavioral rating scales to gain a better understanding of the severity and frequency of your experiences. One of our clinicians will also conduct a one-on-one interview to get to know and understand your unique situation. Interviews with or information from others who know you well may also be gathered.
The goal of psychological testing is to help you understand your behavior and assess areas of strengths and weaknesses to create practical means of addressing challenges to daily function. Psychological evaluation is meant to educate patients about their own skills and abilities. It is not necessarily a diagnostic tool so much as a way to help you develop a plan to better meet your therapy goals. At DFW Assessment, we provide evaluations, documentation, practical recommendations, and consultation. However, we encourage patients who do not already have an established therapeutic relationship to make a plan for continued therapeutic care beyond your psychological evaluation.