Assignment: Measure Illness And Diagnose Clients

Assignment: Measure Illness And Diagnose Clients
Assignment: Measure Illness And Diagnose Clients
Assessment tools have two primary purposes: 1) to measure illness and diagnose clients, and 2) to measure a client’s response to treatment. Often, you will find that multiple assessment tools are designed to measure the same condition or response. Not all tools, however, are appropriate for use in all clinical situations. You must consider the strengths and weaknesses of each tool to select the appropriate assessment tool for your client. For this Discussion, as you examine the assessment tool assigned to you by the Course Instructor, consider its use in psychotherapy.
To prepare:
· Review this week’s Learning Resources and reflect on the insights they provide.
· Consider the assessment tool assigned to you by the Course Instructor.
· Review the Library Course Guide in your Learning Resources for assistance in locating information on the assessment tool you were assigned.
Post an explanation of the psychometric properties of the assessment tool you were assigned. Explain when it is appropriate to use this assessment tool with clients, including whether the tool can be used to evaluate the efficacy of psychopharmacologic medications. Support your approach with evidence-based literature.
I was assigned Simpson- Angus Scale Extrapyramidal Symptom Rating Scale
What is Clinical Evaluation?
To effectively treat a client and know that the treatment chosen worked (or is working), a mental health professional must first conduct a clinical assessment of the client, which entails gathering information and drawing conclusions through observation, psychological tests, neurological tests, and interviews to determine the person’s problem and presenting symptoms.
This information is gathered by learning about the client’s skills, abilities, personality traits, cognitive and emotional functioning, social context in terms of environmental stresses, and cultural variables specific to them, such as language or ethnicity.
Clinical evaluation is carried out not only at the start of the process of seeking care, but also throughout it.
What is the reason for this?
Think about it.
First, we must assess whether or not treatment is required.
We can determine to what extent the individual is adversely affected by getting a clear accounting of the person’s symptoms and how they effect everyday functioning.
If a therapy is required, the second reason for conducting a clinical assessment is to identify which treatment will be most effective.
There are a variety of therapy options, as you will learn later in this session.
Behavioral treatments, cognitive and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), humanistic-experiential therapies, psychodynamic therapies, couples and family therapy, and biological treatments are among them (psychopharmacology).
Of course, some of the aforementioned therapies will be more effective than others for any given mental disease.
Even if numerous therapies are effective, that does not indicate that one will be effective for that particular client.
Assessment can assist in determining this.
Finally, we must determine whether the remedy we used was effective.
This will entail taking measurements before and after any therapy, as well as monitoring behavior while the treatment is in place.
We’ll want to keep measuring after the treatment is finished to make sure the disorder’s symptoms don’t reappear.
Knowing the person’s baselines for various elements of psychological functioning can aid us in determining when they improve.
In summary, getting baselines occurs at the start, implementing the agreed-upon treatment plan occurs in the middle, and ensuring that the treatment provides the desired outcome occurs at the conclusion.
This debate should have made it obvious that clinical assessment is a continuous process.
3.1.2. Assessment Key Concepts
Three key ideas are involved in the evaluation process: reliability, validity, and standardization.
In fact, these three are crucial to science as a whole.
First and foremost, we want the assessment to be consistent and dependable.
When our automobile has a problem and we take it to the mechanic, we want to make sure that what one mechanic says is wrong with our car is the same as what another, or even two other mechanics say.
If that’s the case, the tools they use to evaluate cars are incorrect.
A patient suffering from a mental illness is in the same boat.
There is a problem with the evaluation technique if one mental health expert believes the person has major depressive disorder and another says the problem is borderline personality disorder (in this case, the DSM and more on that in a bit).
Interrater reliability refers to the consistency of two separate raters’ assessments of the same patient.
When a person takes a test one day and then the same test the next day, this is an example of reliability.
The person’s answers should be consistent, which is known as test-retest reliability.
Take, for example, a person who takes the MMPI on Tuesday and then again on Friday.
The MMPI results should be fairly comparable to one another unless anything amazing or sad occurs in the two days between assessments.
What does it mean to be identical?
The score on the first test and the score on the second test are connected.
If the test is valid, the correlation should be very high (remember, a correlation ranges from -1.00 to +1.00, and positive means that when one score rises, so does the other, thus the positive correlation for the two tests should be high).
We want to check sure the test measures what it claims to measure, in addition to its reliability.
This is referred to as validity.
Assume a new test is created to assess depressive symptoms.
It’s put up against a tried-and-true test like the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI).
If the new test is meant to evaluate depression, the results should be quite similar to those produced by the BDI.
This is referred to as contemporaneous validity or descriptive validity.
We might even inquire about the validity of an assessment tool.
If we say yes, it has facial validity, albeit it’s worth noting that this isn’t based on any statistical or evidence-based approach of determining validity.
A personality test that questions about how people act in specific scenarios is one example.
As a result, it appears to measure personality, or we have the impression that it measures what we expect.
When a tool properly anticipates what will happen in the future, it is said to have predictive validity.
Let’s imagine we’re trying to figure out whether a high school kid will succeed in college.
We may design a nationwide exam to assess required talents, perhaps called the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT).
We’d have high school students take it by their senior year, then wait a few years till they’re in college to see how they do.
We would anticipate that if they did well on the SAT, they would also do well in college.
If this is the case, the SAT is a good predictor of college achievement.
A test like the Graduate Record Exam (GRE) and its potential to predict graduate school performance would be the same.
Finally, we want to ensure that a patient’s experience taking a test or being assessed is comparable to that of another patient taking the same or a different exam on the same or different days, with the same or a different tester.
Standardization is the process of achieving this by the application of well defined rules, norms, and/or procedures.
Equally vital is that mental health specialists interpret the testing findings in the same way, or else the meaning of a given score may be unclear.