Diagnosis by itself does very little to help adults or children manage any type of emotional or behavioral health problem . Why? Because every person has a very unique type of personality within which the problem is occurring. Everybody has a unique personality profile, as unique as their fingerprint.
Great psychological assessment will map out the key facets of your “personality print”. This ensures impactful treatment giving you the results you want.
Let’s take ADHD.
Every person experiences, expresses, and tries to control their ADHD in a very unique way. Parents intimately understand this, because they tell me that even though the child has been diagnosed with ADHD, they have no clue what to do about it!!!!!
Compassionate and innovative clinicians or behavioral science consultants understand that clinical problems (or even athletic performance problems), especially emotional behavioral problems, need to be understood within the rich tapestry of each person personality dynamics. In fact, there is a significant volume of scientific literature indicating that if you or your child is going to get better from problems like ADHD (or anxiety, anger, etc.), we must pay as much attention to personality variable as diagnostic categories. The type of diagnosis you have is not necessarily a reliable predictor of if you will get better or not!!! Example: The same two children with ADHD, one who is insightful and compliant, the other angry and oppositional, may have very different outcomes.
In this way, great psychological assessment is not about a diagnosis (thought it may include it), but rather it is about helping a person see a diagnosis within the context of a personality. Unfortunately, too much of healthcare is about seeing a person by over focusing on their problem, rather than by seeing the problem within the context of a personality.
In contrast, I work in a VERY different way, as I discuss here here
Listen to me talk about this as I am interviewed by Lon Woodbury, a nationally renowned child expert…