What I Do
Comprehensive neuropsychological, psychological and psychoeducational evaluations
Specializing in assessing survivors of trauma, ADHD, and ASD
Areas of Expertise
I believe that every individual is unique and therefore needs an individualized assessment process. I specialize in evaluating:
Neurodevelopmental Functioning
ADHD, Autism, and Intellectual Disability
Psychological Functioning
Trauma Related Disorders, Depression, OCD, Anxiety Related Disorders, Mood Disorders, Psychosis, Personality Disorders
Academic Functioning
Specific Learning Disabilities or Learning Challenges
Neurocognitive Functioning
Impairments from traumatic brain injury or other medical conditions
What Is Assessed
In order to evaluate your cognitive, academic, psychological, and developmental functioning, IÂ will assess the following domains:
Cognitive Intelligence
Overall intelligence can be a good predictor of strengths and weaknesses. It assesses your verbal comprehension (or relationship with verbal information), perceptual reasoning (or relationship with visual stimuli), working memory (or your ability to hold information in your brain, change that information, and produce something new), and processing speed (or how fast you take in and understand visual information).
Complex Attention
A broad term that involves your ability to focus selectively on a particular stimulus, sustain that focus, divide that attention, and shift it at will. It also incorporates how fast you process incoming information.
Executive Function
An umbrella term that describes strategies and cognitive processes a person uses to execute behavior. In other words, how you do what you do. Executive function involves the ability to shift from one task, thought, or activity to another, problems solve, self-monitor, initiate tasks, inhibit behavior, regulate emotions, plan how you will do something, and to organize your behaviors, materials, and environment.
Memory and Learning
Involves short term memory (i.e., how much information can you remember over a short period of time, such as a few seconds) and long term memory (i.e. how much information can you remember after a certain amount of time). Memory also involves how you recall and recognize information (i.e. can you generate the information independently or do you need prompts or cues).
Academic Functioning
Academic achievement involves how you are functioning academically in three categories: Reading, Writing, and Mathematics. This domain assesses where you are relative to your own cognitive ability or potential as well as where you are in comparison to your same aged peers. We are able to see if you struggle with specific aspects of reading, such as comprehension, writing, such as grammar or syntax, or mathematics, such as utilizing formulas to solve problems, to determine the presence of a learning disability.
Socio-Emotional Functioning
How you see yourself (self-concept), others (interpersonal-concept), and the world around you. Here, we look at your personality style, emotional regulation strategies, coping styles and the presence of any mental health difficulties such as depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress, mania, psychosis, dissociation, behavioral dysregulation.
The Assessment Process
Intake Process
After an initial phone consult, we will meet for a full intake session in order to gather information from you and your support system (if appropriate) about your functioning, lifestyle, symptoms, history.
I will ask about trauma history - but you do not have to disclose nor talk about it in depth.
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We will also discuss together my recommendations for testing (i.e what type of testing) that fit your needs and go over informed consent, so you know exactly what to expect moving forward.
Testing Sessions
If you feel that I am a great fit for you, we will schedule testing sessions. The amount of time spent in testing depends on your unique needs. A full psychoeducational evaluation will typically range from 6 to 8 hours of testing.
Feedback Sessions
After testing is complete, I score and compile all of the data from the evaluation. Usually, I will write a comprehensive report explaining the results, diagnoses, as well as recommendations. It can take about four weeks to complete the entire assessment process, especially if receiving a full evaluation.
A 1.5-2 hour feedback session is scheduled for you at that time to go over the evaluation results as well as what the numbers really mean for you and your life. I will explain diagnoses if given and collaboratively discuss recommendations to help you succeed at your goals. Finally, we talk about the next steps.
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Even after the feedback session, I am available to answer questions as well as support your next steps (i.e consult with the school or other members of treatment team to discuss findings).
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