Evaluation, Screening, or Diagnostic Clarification
I am credentialed to screen, evaluate, and diagnose clients when requested, given my credentials including training in Behavioral Medicine, the intersection of mind/body/emotions at Cambridge Health Alliance, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, holding a PhD in clinical psychology and licensed as a psychologist and health service provider, continuing education pursuits including ethics, experience in and out-patient settings, elementary school, university, clinic, and private practice settings, and participation in my own psychotherapy and supervision.
Populations for which I do so are adults, some young adults and older teens, families, and elders seeking evaluations and treatment for behavioral, neurological and medical conditions that are affected by psychological factors, or are exacerbated by stress. I also work with those wanting to change habitual patterns, as well as those wanting to modify or adapt their lifestyles, or achieve certain goals.
A Word on Diagnosis
While diagnosing or labeling are not necessary for our work together, having the rubric of a shared language can contextualize and validate certain styles of feeling, sensing, thinking, or behaving. If you plan on seeking insurance reimbursement or interventions such as accommodations at work or school, then diagnoses are requested.
Evaluation, with or without diagnostic clarification, is often experienced as a relief, and can help direct next steps and actions to take towards one’s goals. We can tease apart elements or patterns that often co-exist as a complex whole and direct services to achieve greater cohesion and self-understanding.
Though I trained in, taught, and worked in the field of intelligence, personality, and neuropsychological testing, I refer out for these specific evaluations to neuropsychologists, as well as sleep studies, behavioral optometry, audiological, learning disability testing. I do, however, often screen for many psychological and neurodivergences, and help clients integrate and understand the application to their lives of the complex, discrepant, or asynchronous findings from other assessments.
Most of my clients are complex, creative people with many strengths co-existing with some challenges or barriers to their vision for themselves. The presence or absence of one specific diagnosis is mostly likely an oversimplification and our work often aims to help clients or families generate a more positive, cohesive, empowered sense of self than any identification with one diagnostic label or category would achieve. For others it helps them locate like-minded community, resources and supports, and sometimes determine if and which medication could make a possible difference.
I am uniquely experienced and competent to evaluate for, and provide qualitative differential diagnoses, to screen for concerns, and to answer questions about:
- Accommodations at work and school
- ADHD/ADD
- Anxiety
- Attention variabilities
- Auditory processing, hearing differences
- Autistic traits
- Creativity
- CAPD -Central Auditory Processing Differences
- Dyslexia
- Divergent thinking
- Emotional Intensity
- Empathic processing
- End of Life choices
- Ethical or Moral mindset
- Executive Functioning issues
- Existential Depression
- Existential Questions
- Giftedness (see Giftedness page for definition used in this practice)
- Gifted elders
- Grief
- Hearing challenges
- Learning Differences
- LGBTQIA2S+ co-occurrences (gifted, creative, sensory processing)
- Loss
- Misophonia, Misokinesia and others
- Multipotentiality
- Neurodiversity/Neuroindividuality
- Parenting outside the norm
- Perfectionism/Pursuit of Excellence
- OCD-Obsessive Compulsive Personality or Disorder
- Organizing challenges
- Overcontrolled Personality
- Overexcitabilities (Dabrowsky’s OEs)
- Searching for meaning, purpose
- Sensory Processing Differences
- Sound Sensitivities
- Spiritual Experiences
- Stimulation seeking/avoidance
- Twice or Multi exceptionalities
- Vision Processing
Contact our office to get started.