Week 12: Clinical Assessment
When referring to clinical assessment, one generally is referring to applying assessment procedures to four different areas. Those areas are diagnosing a mental disorder, developing a plan of intervention, monitoring progress in counseling, and evaluating counseling outcomes. This all boils down to the sequential nature of diagnostics. First the counselor collects relevant data, then the counselor organizes and integrates the data gathered, and then the clinician uses clinical judgment to form an opinion about a client’s diagnosis. After this, the counselor will continue to use assessments in tracking progress, and evaluating the counseling outcome.
In order to gather the information, track the progress, and evaluate the outcome of counseling, the counselors will need to be familiar with multiple types of data collection instruments and strategies. This chapter covers several categories of assessments used frequently by counselors, and covers suicide assessment as well. It is a busy chapter! Be sure to keep up and read the information well, since the health of your clients depends on it.
You will have multiple assessments to administer to yourself again this week, and will learn to score them and report on those scores. This is also the second to last week of the course, so your paper is due the end of the course and you will need to be attending to completing that as well. It is important to keep up and not get behind the last two weeks of the course.
Session Objectives
By the end of this week, you will:
- Describe and explain the purpose of clinical assessment
- Define mental disorder
- Describe the DMS IV TR, and explain its use in clinical assessment
- Explain the multiaxial system of diagnosis
- Describe the use of various interviews in clinical assessment
- Describe the Mental Status Exam (MSE)
- List and describe instruments commonly used in clinical assessment
- List the risk factors and warning signs of suicide, and explain how suicide risk is assessed
- Describe the value of observation in clinical assessment
- Describe neuropsychological assessment
- Discuss cultural considerations in clinical assesment
- Explain the purpose of written assessment reports
- Describe each section of the assessment report
- Describe the qualities of a well-written assessment report
