Start Your Mental Health Journey Here
Before starting treatment with a mental health provider, consider this…
What if you could meet with a specialist whose entire practice exists for the purpose of accurately, comprehensively identifying mental health problems, symptoms, and diagnoses, and developing individualized treatment plans? This is what Dr. Chase has done for thousands of clients and patients over the better part of a decade. Many providers of therapy and psychiatry services refer patients and clients to Dr. Chase before providing treatments, due to the level of detail and accuracy offered by a formal evaluation. When receiving psychological or neuropsychological testing, you are being set out on a path that is tailor-fitted to you, rather than “cookie-cutter” medicine. Wouldn’t it be great to go to a therapist, psychiatrist, or neurologist and get right down to business with your treatment?
Why begin mental health care with an evaluation?
When most people are seeking mental health services for themselves or for a loved one, they reach out to make an appointment for psychotherapy, counseling, or psychiatry services. What most people do not realize is that a therapist or psychiatrist may require many appointments and a great deal of familiarization with the client before a robust understanding and diagnosis of problems or disorders can be obtained. In fact, especially in cases of complex or co-occurring disorders, providers of psychiatry and therapy services will refer the client out for a specialized diagnostic assessment in order to identify the specific types of symptoms, causes, and most appropriate treatments for the client. In some cases, a person may have reached out to a psychiatrist, but is not a good candidate for psychotropic medication due to their particularly symptoms or disorder not being well treated through medications, based on existing research. Prescribers often require some trials and experimentation, as well as extended time to assess a patient, in order to arrive at the best medication for a given patient. This process is shortened and made more effective when psychological testing is completed before a psychiatric prescriber begins to treat the patient. This same advantage applies to psychotherapy, behavioral modification, educational therapy, addiction treatment, and other forms of care.
Why get testing before therapy?
Psychological assessment is your launch pad for addressing mental health, or the mental health of a loved one such as your child or spouse. By undergoing a psychological evaluation and testing before starting therapy, a person effectively bypasses many weeks (often months) worth of introductory interviewing and data gathering with the therapist. Instead of several therapy sessions being spent for the purposes of “figuring out” what is going on and how to treat it, the client can bring a psychological evaluation report into a therapy appointment and immediately have a road map of sorts, which contains recommendations for the methods, techniques, and specific patterns to tackle in the therapeutic process. A client may respond to certain types of therapeutic relationship or interactional styles, which can also be highlighted in the report, and therefore enhance the way the client receives therapy services from the provider.
A major advantage of starting your mental healthcare journey with an assessment is that you can be confident of finding the right fit with your treatment providers. When you are evaluated by a specialist like Dr. Chase, you are assessed for treatment needs, personality, preferences, and many other variables. The testing specialist will provide you with a supportive feedback appointment, in which you will find answers, recommendations, and specific referrals. This feedback session is packed with hope, actionable steps, and helpful explanations. A client walks away from an evaluation with referrals to providers that are competent in working with the diagnosed condition, able to fit well with the client’s personality, and experienced with any unique considerations that might inform the provider selection process.
For those in need of couples therapy or family therapy, couples’ assessments and parent-child are also very useful, due to the personality mapping that results from in-depth examination of each partner or the child-parent dyad, as well as their relational styles, before the romantic partners or child and parent begin marital, couples, or family therapy. This kind of assessment readily identifies some of the key differences or sources of conflict and turmoil that can be addressed in couples therapy or family therapy, but this information is obtained quickly by the psychological testing specialist.