Clinical Assessment

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To be able to treat a client effectively, mental health professionals first need to perform a clinical assessment of the client. This assessment refers to the collection of information and consequently drawing conclusions about the client’s symptoms and disorder(s). For this purpose, the health professional does observations, administers (neuro)psychological tests, and interviews the client. In this course, we will introduce you to such clinical assessment. During the first sessions, we acquaint you with screening tools that are used in the earliest stages. Next, we go more in-depth and you will learn to administer tests that are commonly done as follow-up for a number of disorders. For example, you acquire skills to administer Anxiety and Depression scales, to run neuropsychological tests for the measurement of attention and memory, and you will be acquainted with tools to examine potential problems with sensory integration. In all cases, we discuss which types of tests are used across the life span. At the end of the course, for the materials studied, you are able to develop a basic screening protocol with follow-up testing.