Collaborative Assessment

Benefits of Assessment:

Psychological assessment offers a clear path to understanding yourself more deeply. Through validated tests and measures, we explore the way you think and learn, how you understand, express and manage your emotions, and how you relate to yourself and others.

Assessment can be the most thorough and efficient way to understand your strengths, difficulties, and how you typically cope with challenges. With this knowledge in hand, we can start to explore new ways of making positive and meaningful changes in your life.

Here are some specific ways assessment can help:

  • Understand why you struggle with school or at work so you can take the necessary steps to succeed.

  • Clarify your diagnosis (e.g., ADHD, autism, learning disability, depression, PTSD, bipolar, etc), personality traits or interpersonal and attachment patterns in order to pursue appropriate interventions.

  • Understand why you struggle in relationships so you can begin to connect more meaningfully to others.

  • Identify why therapy has not worked well in the past so you can move forward in your treatment.

My Approach:

Assessment works best as a collaborative effort. I work alongside you, using relevant tests to answer your specific questions while maintaining ongoing feedback and dialogue. This process often becomes a form of brief psychotherapy, allowing you to connect test results with your evolving self-understanding, building a more complete and useful perspective on yourself.

What to Expect:

Depending on your goals and questions, an assessment can take between 2-8 sessions.

  • The first session (75-90 minutes) focuses on understanding your current struggles, developing assessment goals, and gathering relevant background information.

  • Testing sessions follow, typically in 2-3 hour blocks. For questions about cognitive or academic performance, we'll assess your thinking, planning, attention, memory, and academic skills. For emotional or relationship concerns, we'll use a combination of questionnaires, diagnostic interviews, and specialized assessment tools. I only use reliable and valid tests (such as WAIS-IV, WMS-IV, MMPI-3, PAI, NEO PI-R, AAP, CWS, and R-PAS).

  • After testing, we'll meet to discuss results, explore their meaning, and review specific recommendations. I'll prepare a user-friendly written report tailored to your needs. This report can serve multiple purposes, from supporting academic accommodations to providing a clear summary for you or your treatment providers.

  • Understanding and integrating assessment results is an ongoing process. I encourage a follow-up session after several weeks to explore how you're making sense of the findings and address any new questions or insights that have emerged. I remain available for ongoing consultation with schools or other providers at my usual rate.