Clinical Assessment Process Analysis

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The process of those with mental abnormalities go through is a series of steps. First is the clinical assessment by a licensed clinician, the next is diagnosis of their dysfunction, and the final step is to begin a treatment that works for the client. Unfortunately, not always do people seek help for their abnormal behaviors and go untreated, resulting in more severe cases of their problems. Often people who suffer are encouraged by family, friends, and peers to go through these steps to better themselves and their quality of life. When a client visits a therapist (or clinician), the therapist will learn as much as they possibly can about the client and their condition in order to a possible reason and solution to the abnormal behavior. This …show more content…

When using a particular type of assessment tool, it is imperative that clinicians follow the same procedures. standardizing a tool means setting up common steps to be followed whenever it is administered. Standardizing does not only apply to tools and procedures, but also the way the results are interpreted, this way they can understand what the results mean. Reliability ties into assessments because it refers to the consistency of the assessment measures. To have a good assessment tool means it will always yield similar results. Another requirement for a god assessment tool is validity: it must accurately measure what it is supposed to …show more content…

This is the stage where the clinician gathers basic background information to try and pinpoint the stimuli that triggers responses and their consequences. Cognitive interviews try to discover assumptions and interpretations that influence the person. Humanistic clinicians ask about the client's opinions of themselves, or a self-evaluation, self-concept, and values. Biological clinicians are geared to a more chemical aspect and look to for biological or brain dysfunction. Finally, sociocultural interviews try to gain information related to family, social, and cultural environments. A mental status exam is included in most structured interviews and consists of a set of questions and observations that systematically evaluate the client's awareness, an orientation pertaining to time and location, attention span, memory, judgement and insight, thought content and process, mood, and appearance. Nonetheless there are some limitations to these interviews, "because different clinicians can obtain different answers and draw different conclusions even when they ask the same questions of the same person, some researchers believe that interviewing should be discarded as a tool of clinical assessment"

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