Psychological assessment

Some of the sessions can be rebated under a referral from a GP, paediatrician, or psychiatrist for items marked ‘Complex Neurodevelopmental Disorders and eligible disabilities’. Please enquire with your GP, paediatrician, or psychiatrist about the process.

Assessments reveal your strengths, learning style, challenges, unique qualities, and potential eligibility for extra funding and support. At a minimum, assessments can help support them by overcoming barriers, using their strengths, and identifying available government support.

Assessments can help adolescents, young adults, and their families understand and address neurodevelopmental, learning, and mental health issues, including developmental delays and conditions like autism and ADHD.

More information allows for a better diagnosis by the psychologist. Following our initial consultation to determine the assessment needs, we’ll collect the diagnostic data. The process involves psychometric testing, direct observation, structured interviews, and reviewing documents like school reports and previous assessments. A wide range of sources is ideal, encompassing the individual, their family, school, workplace, and other relevant contexts. After gathering all the data, the psychologist will use their clinical judgment to make a diagnosis. All the details will be shared with you in our final feedback session.

The length of an assessment will depend on the number and type of assessments required, and this will be determined on a case-by-case basis. All assessments include an intake interview and feedback session. Depending on individual needs, the assessment process can vary from three to eight hours and will likely be spread over multiple sessions.

Ideally, the intake session will be attended by parents, close relations, or significant others of the person who wants to be assessed. The idea is to gather as much background information as possible to make an informed decision about the assessment needs. Parents or teachers may be asked to participate in screening questionnaires as well.

Unless specifically needed or required, the assessment sessions will be between the clinician or administrator and the person to be assessed.

For the feedback session, parents, close relations, or significant others are very much encouraged to attend as well to discuss outcomes and further support or treatment options.

If we decide together that there is no need for an assessment after the initial session, we will refund you the intake fee minus the fee for the initial session and any additional costs that may have occurred until then, such as those for online screening questionnaires.

Once we have decided together on assessment(s) to be performed, you are “all in”. This means we have booked the assessment sessions, have allocated the resources to be used during these assessments, including clinicians and administrators, and started the diagnostic process. While we can split the process into multiple sessions for convenience purposes, it is one process that needs to be performed as a whole to get to the outcome. The initial sessions works as a decision-making point. Once you have made the decision to proceed with the assessment(s), we are kicking off and allocating the whole process, which has to be done in a specific manner and over a certain time to be valid. While we are happy to work with you to accommodate minor alterations, it is imortant to stick to the process if we do not want to endanger the validity of the outcome. Therefore, once you have made a decision to proceed, refunds are unfortunately not possible.

Our clinicians and administrators are very experienced and diligent in providing you with an accurate diagnosis based on the available assessment outcomes and our clinical judgment. If there are any concerns from our side, we will address and dicuss these during the process with you. If you have any questions or concerns during the assessment process, we encourage you to bring these up with us so we can discuss and address these as soon as possible.

We take the diagnostic process very seriously. At the same time, we always try to see the whole person, their strengths and their needs, and how the diagnosis fits into their particular circumstances. With the increased availability of diagnostic criteria and misguided assessment tools on social media and popular websites, it is very easy for individuals and their close relations to jump from initial concerns to conclusions about a persons alleged condition. It is therefore important to keep an open mind about the diagnostic outcomes, which is something we discuss at your intake session but also throughout the process. While an initial concern is helpful in guiding the diagnostic process, it is the process that needs to lead to the outcome, whatever it may be in the end.

No, you will need to see a GP, paediatrician, or psychiatrist to receive medication. We will discuss if medication may be an option with you depending on your diagnosis and we can send your assessment report to the medical specialist to inform the decision.