formal assessment
Formal Assessments are used to diagnose Autism, ADHD, and Personality Disorders, and other diagnoses that require more thorough assessment, the use of specialized psychological tests, and the use of many different kinds of data.
Crys Brown offers assessments specifically designed to meet the needs of adults, with special attention paid to meeting the needs of women, gender and sexual minorities, and other groups that are often misdiagnosed and can be overlooked in assessments. Crys strives to write reports that use affirming and respectful language while also maintaining important clinical language
FAQs
-
Step 1- The consult call - After you reach out Crys will book a brief consult phone call with you so that you can ask any questions you might have and explain in more detail what you are looking for. These calls usually happen the same week you reach out and take about 15 minutes.
Step 2 - The intake meeting - Assessments start with a 90 minute intake meeting, during which Crys will ask you questions to collect relevant mental health and background information. These meetings cost 300.00 and they happen as soon as we can book them after we speak, usually within a couple of weeks. This meeting is always part of a thorough assessment, but doing it as a separate meeting before booking the whole assessment allows Crys to make the most efficient assessment plan for you. Rarely, people will decide not to do the whole assessment process after getting some feedback from Crys, for example, sometimes it becomes clear in these meetings that the question a person has isn’t likely to be answered by this type of assessment, and it’s a huge benefit to figure this out before investing in the assessment.
Step 3 - Approval of the assessment plan - After the intake meeting Crys will send an email with your proposed assessment plan including how many hours the assessment will take and how much it will cost. If you decide to go ahead we will book your testing as soon as possible. Testing dates usually happen within about 4-8 weeks after you approve the plan, though sometimes they can be sooner if we get lucky with timing!
Step 4 - The assessment - These assessments usually involve meeting for between 3 to 8 hours for testing, and interviews, as well as questionnaires to fill out between meetings. Crys will often talk to and/or send questionnaires to collect information from 1-2 people who know you well. Crys may also review previous assessments or report cards if you have those.
Step 5 - The debrief meeting - After Crys collects all the data your debrief appointment will be booked. These appointments are usually about 3 to 4 weeks after your last testing date to allow for time to write your report. At the debrief meeting you will get your report and you will have 90 minutes with Crys to discuss the results of your testing.
-
The cost for these assessments usually ranges from about $1500.00 to $5500.00 dollars. This is quite a large range and while it would be nice to narrow this range down a lot more before speaking to you, every assessment is based on a person’s own assessment questions and history, so there is not one set price for every assessment. Crys works with a lot of tricky assessments, such as situations where people might have a lot of different diagnoses already, might be masking their symptoms, or have very complicated mental health histories. It takes more hours to answer tricky questions well, and for that reason, these tend not to be low cost assessments.
Crys has done lots of reduced rate assessments recently and is not currently able to offer sliding scale assessments at this time.
-
ABSOLUTELY. While Crys’ assessments are not the most expensive you can find, they are more expensive than a lot of folks because:
There are pros and cons to all kinds of time-saving measures, but at this time Crys doesn’t use any AI, psychometrists (people who do testing for assessors), ghost writing (yes, this really happens!) students, or other administrative help to write their assessments. If you are paying for an hour of Crys’ time, you are getting an hour of Crys’ time. Though lots of psychologists charge for their full fee even if they are using these time-saving measures, those that do pass savings along to clients are able to charge a much lower fee.
2. Crys tends toward more comprehensive assessments, which means that the goal of their assessments is to answer real clinical questions, not just determine if one diagnosis is present or not. Telling someone that they don’t have ADHD is not as satisfying or helpful as telling them what diagnoses are likely causing their executive functioning issues instead. As an assessor who has done clinical therapy work for years, Crys finds more comprehensive assessments more helpful for clients. Also, when clients pay for an assessment it is significantly less costly to add on some time to explore what could be going on more fully than it is to do another whole assessment.
3. Especially for Autism assessments, Crys tends to assess lots of adults who are high-masking which means that their Autistic traits may be more subtle, and assessments for people with this presentation simply take a little longer to do well. If we don’t add enough hours to explore what is going on, there is a risk that a client is misdiagnosed. Most lower support needs Autistic adults have already experienced lots of misdiagnosis, so we try our very best not to repeat that by being as thorough as we can.
-
At the end of the assessment you get a detailed report that outlines all of your results, diagnosis or diagnoses if any, and recommendations that can include resources, therapy suggestions, or other things Crys thinks might be helpful.
-
No. This is a specialized type of assessment. Crys is the only clinician trained in this type of assessment at Brown Psychological Services
-
After an assessment, if someone is eligible, Crys can help them with the disability tax credit form, but the cost of this is not included in the assessment fee. Crys charges for one hour of work at their usual rate of 250.00 per hour to fill out these applications.