Psychological Evaluation

Psyche exams are a bit more in depth than a mental status exam, or can be used alongside one. It can help provide understanding with how one is doing mentally, emotionally and behaviorally.
Psyche evals measure how we are doing such as our emotional well being and our adaption to life matters. (photo wiki)

Psychological evaluations, commonly referred to as psyche evals, are simply one of any numerous ways that one can have their mental well-being measured. They sound rather intimidating, but they are meant to help in quickly assessing where we are in terms of our emotional health, our behavioral health and social functioning.

There are two primary types of evaluations – one is more along the lines of clinical interviewing, which is a formal way of saying talk therapy. That is my usual methodology.

The second type is with a test instrument where there could be 100 statements that you might rate from strongly disagree to strongly agree. The test instruments measure certain factors such as mood and personality.

In some cases, such as preparing to have surgery or applying for a sensitive job, and a team of professionals need to communicate, then a combination of the clinical and test instrument based evaluations are combined.

It’s very common to require a psyche eval for procedures such as gender surgeries, bariatric surgery, cosmetic surgery, fertility treatments, neurological surgeries, organ transplants and so on.

I am now using a newer psyche test instrument called SPECTRA which was developed by Dr. Mark Blais and published in 2018. SPECTRA is novel in that it measures three primary levels of difficulty psychologically.

On the internal level, SPECTRA measures how well one is doing internally, focusing on depression, anxiety, social anxiety and trauma. On the external level, SPECTRA measures how well one is doing externally such as with substance abuse, aggression and treating other people. Finally, on the reality check level, SPECTRA measures how well one is doing with constructive thinking and down to earth thinking or how lucid one is. In addition to the three levels, a combined single measure (called a p-Factor) shows how well one is doing overall is constructed

Once we complete the SPECTRA test instrument together, we will see how you are doing and consider a mental health diagnosis together if desired.