Health and Psychology

A good friend and colleague called.  He does the same type of complex testing I do and we have similar laments about what others, even in our profession, know about what we do.   "Someone just asked me what tests I give to get people a private room as an accommodation. I said I evaluate people. I don't just administer tests."

I understand completely.  I get the same types of calls.  So the first step in the process of an evaluation of anything is to talk ...

I work with several companies providing social security disability assessments (SSI/SSDI).  I've done this for the past 15 years.  The system is not well understood by applicants and is extremely frustrating for those of us involved in attempting to assist applicants and the analysts and judges that send applicants to us.

My job in performing what are referred to as "Comprehensive Psychological Examinations" is to document what an applicant tells me about their con...

A friend of mine confessed that he had difficulty deleting text messages.  I have a 90% full voice mail that I deleted down to 25% full, while I was texting him.  Yes, it's possible to hoard technology snippets.

Hoarding is the excessive collection of items and the inability to discard them.  Information hoarders hoard technology and paper.  In some cases it may be a symptom of obcessive compulsive disorder.  But in some cases, people that hoard don'...

In the past week a colleague of mine and I have seen about 6 children that appear to have been misdiagnosed with attention deficit disorder or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.  The children had a few things in common.  They were all reportedly diagnosed by their elementary or preschool teachers and referred to their primary care physicians for medication.  They all live in an underserved community and were all boys.

The hallmark of Attention Deficit D...

I work with a couple of start up companies.  This is volunteer work that pays itself back to me a zillion times over. Over the years I've seen a lot of companies struggle with problems that were avoidable and will take a lot of time to correct.  It's much easier to start off on the right foot and do it right from the beginning than to have to figure out how to fix things later.  This is especially true in the field of mental health.  

My employment life s...

Psychiatric terms get changed when they get caught up in the mainstream.  So people start reporting normal mood fluctuations as "bipolar disorder,"  normal concerns about germs or a desire for order as "OCD", concerns about finances as "Posttraumatic Stress Disorder or panic disorder."  No.  Not remotely.

I sat down with a client reporting serious concerns about finances, worrying dreams about money, and being afraid every time he opens a bill.  "I'm...

I'm in the process of completing a paper on phenomenological testing and neuropsychology with my colleague, Maria Martin, Ph.D.  We're hoping to present at the Los Angeles County Psychological Association in the Fall.

Phenomenological assessment is so much different than standard psychological or neuropsychological assessment. I thought I'd explain the difference here. I do standard psychological evaluations a couple of days a week. These are relatively quick evalu...

Many people do not understand what a health psychologist actually does.  I was talking with my neighbor yesterday who thought I was a scientist and was surprised to see my picture in the paper listed as a psychologist.  I was talking with my brother who has complications from diabetes and reminded him I can work with him on setting up a diet and exercise plan, help him with understanding his medications, make referrals so he can be treated for depression, etc.

Heal...

I had to make a decision recently.  A company I worked for was intending to change what they were doing in relation to my work.  So the major part of what I had hoped to accomplish at my time at the company was going to disappear.  The company tells me that what they intend will be better because there will be more people involved in learning.  But the plan has nothing to do with what I want, hope or dream about.  So I left.

In the meantime, the...

The general public doesn't understand the distinctions between some of the titles people in mental health use.  So I'm often asked about the differencce between a psychiatrist and a psychologist.  A psychiatrist is a medical doctor who first became a physician and then spent their internship and residency in learning about mental health.  They can prescribe medication.  A psychologist began studying mental health for all four to five years of graduate school then completed...