Comprehensive Psychological

Our comprehensive assessment includes cognitive (IQ) testing, achievement (reading, writing, and math) testing, clinical interviews, and a range of mental health measures to obtain a strong overall picture of learning capabilities including strengths and weaknesses, and a mental health profile.  This battery helps identify moderate to severe learning struggles, processing speed issues, mental health issues including trauma, depression, anxiety disorders, mood disorders, substance use, personality disorders, etc. This is a very comprehensive assessment but it is not designed to identify mild learning disabilities, ADHD, spectrum disorders, or brain injury. Each of those issues, if suspected, do require additional testing.

Comprehensive ADHD

This evaluation includes all of the above described in the comprehensive psychological evaluation, and adds a few additional measures to look at possible issues with executive functioning skills. Executive functioning deficits underly a number of mental health issues and is often associated with ADHD. This evaluation can help identify specific executive functioning strengths and weaknesses so you can target your treatment accordingly.

Personality/Mental Health

This is our shortest battery of tests and does not include any cognitive or achievement testing. This battery is aimed at identifying any mental health issues not associated with IQ or learning. This includes mood disorders, trauma, substance use, personality disorders, anxiety disorders, etc.  This group of tests is included in all of our assessments and can be used as a stand-alone, only if the referral question is about these types of disorders (mood disorders, trauma, substance use, personality disorders, anxiety disorders, OCD) with no other concerns. It is also common to give this battery when prior testing was done recently, but personality testing was not included, or major changes have occurred since that prior testing.

Vocational

We do not do vocational testing in isolation, but rather can add vocational testing to any of the above batteries. Vocational testing can be useful to help identify vocational interests when an adolescents or young adult is also looking for advice on direction or next steps in their life. Vocational testing can help identify personal career interests based on both personal interests and personality style.

Neurodiversity, Autism Spectrum Disorder, Nonverbal Learning Disability

At Psychological Solutions USA, we are often asked to complete autism testing with individuals who have been tested before. When we do diagnose autism, a frequently asked is, “How was it missed before?” The answer is- “It wasn’t tested for.” Social developmental testing is specialty testing and many psychologists do not complete that testing unless it is specifically requested.  Even then, mild autism spectrum disorders are easy to miss if you are not up to date on current diagnostic criteria as well as the latest research on masking behaviors. Our neurodiversity/autism battery incorporates all of the tests involved in the ADHD comprehensive assessment and adds social developmental testing.  This is important because other issues can mimic spectrum disorders including severe depression, severe ADHD, social immaturity, nonverbal learning disorder, and attachment disorders. This battery takes a very wide, as well as specific approach to identify the cause of social issues, behavioral issues, and mental health struggles. While it is specifically aimed at identifying autism spectrum disorders, this battery will also address nonverbal learning struggles, attachment issues, or other possible causes of distress that can come alongside or mimic spectrum disorders.

Learning Disability

This evaluation is used to help determine the presence of learning disabilities. While our comprehensive evaluation can determine the presence of moderate to severe learning disabilities, individuals who have learning struggles, but who have also had a significant amount of tutoring, one-on-one interventions, and support may do better on broad achievement testing measures, which could then miss an underlying learning issue. This evaluation incorporates all of the measures of the comprehensive ADHD evaluation and includes additional targeted learning disabilities measures aimed at determining true capabilities in reading, writing, or mathematics. This evaluation can catch mild learning disabilities and determine specific areas in need of remediation (phonics, processing speed, writing organization, applied math, etc).

Neuropsychological

While neuropsychological and psychological evaluation is language often used synonymously, our neuropsychological battery is a very comprehensive battery that includes the ADHD comprehensive assessment and adds additional neuropsychological measures aimed at giving a functional assessment of ones abilities. Full neuropsychological assessments are recommended when there has been a serious head injury, organic brain damage is suspected (from heavy substance use or other causes), or executive functioning weaknesses are very severe. This battery can identify areas of functional strength and weakness.