A Brief Overview Of Clinical Psychology Services

The field of clinical psychology has been around in various forms for over 200 years, and every year the field looks a little different. There are over 50 different areas of psychological practice and the practice of clinical psychology involves using the findings from research into human development and behavior to help people understand personal and inter-personal problems, overcome them and move forward to a more productive and happier life instead of being stuck in the past with unhelpful and maladaptive emotions, thoughts and behaviors that prevent them from developing and moving forward into better, more helpful and more adaptive thoughts, feelings and behaviors. There are a number of ways to do this by using clinical psychology and a well-trained clinical psychologist knows the ways that may be most helpful to a particular individual, family or organization.

We Provide Psychological Assessments, Clinical Behavioral Care Services and Professional Continuing Education Services to the Legal, Medical and Academic Communities and also to the Children, Adolescents and Families they serve. We focus on positive psychology and the Cognitive and Behavioral approach to diagnosis and treatment of psychological matters, with an emphasis on difficult-to-diagnose and difficult-to-treat psychological disorders. We can provide a wide range of clinical psychological services, including a variety of behavioral & psychological assessments (including School Psychology Assessments, Special Education and Neuropsychological Assessments), clinical and counseling services to children, adolescents, adults and senior citizens and consultations and continuing education services to schools and colleges and organizations. You can find more complete descriptions of these services throughout our website.

Before any psychological treatment or remediation can begin, it’s important to understand the nature of the problem or difficulty. A psychological assessment is the necessary first step in determining the strengths and weaknesses in an individual’s functioning when that functioning has been called into question, either by displaying actions that are unexpected or by not displaying actions that are expected, in a given circumstance or environment.

There are many types of assessments, each one focused on the different requirements of an individual, group and circumstance, but every such assessment is a variation of a psychological assessment. Psychological assessments tend to be understood as falling into two broad categories – Cognitive assessments and Behavioral assessments. ??Cognitive evaluations are psychological assessments which tend to focus more on how an individual’s brain function (that’s the ‘cognitive’ or ‘thinking’ part) interacts with that person’s behavior. Cognitive testing is often also called a Neuropsychological Assessment – and we do that. This type of testing is often called for when there are concerns about someone’s memory, ability to reason rationally or understand others.

Behavioral evaluations are psychological assessments which tend to focus more on how an individual is interacting with his or her environment and how they are functioning in the real world. The emphasis here is on the emotions, attitudes, habits and other “behaviors” that everyone exhibits. In truth, every good psychological assessment focuses on both behavior and cognition to some extent because we are all thinking, feeling and experiential human beings.

How we think, feel and experience is what comprises our psychological makeup. That is, we are all psychological beings and we interact with the world psychologically, not just physically.??There are literally thousands of psychological assessments available and all such assessments must be done by experienced, licensed and credentialed professionals to ensure that such assessments are not accidentally or deliberately misused to provide false or misleading information.

We focus on the appropriate psychological assessment of infants, toddlers, children, adolescents, adults and seniors. We can do this because we have developmental view of individuals over their lifespan.

Common uses of such assessments include “health” behaviors such as smoking, obesity, eating disorders and other maladaptive behaviors which compromise an individual’s health. In general, we are able to assist physicians and staff with evaluation and management of patients with dementia, sleep disorders, ADD, anxiety, panic, depression and the like. We can assess and treat adults as well as children, including very young children, who have serious medical issues, such as diabetes, cardiovascular issues, failure-to-thrive issues and general non-compliance about following the treatment advice from their Primary Care Providers (PCPs). We also treat more common issues such as bed-wetting, encopresis and obesity.

We also assess and treat adolescents, including those with Eating Disorders, cutting disorders and other self-injurious behaviors (SIB), and we also assess and treat adults and senior family members, including seniors, whether living at home with their families or in assisted or skilled-care facilities or rehab setting and who may have emotional or cognitive declines or competency or self-care issues.