what i do best

I provide formal assessments for Autism, ADHD, and Personality Disorders and general assessment for most other conditions including OCD, PTSD, Anxiety Disorders, and Mood Disorders. I also teach general assessment to supervisees, consult with other professionals about diagnostic questions, and offer workshops and training in this area to the broader clinical community. I specialize in adult assessment, and while there are lots of great assessors who assess across the lifespan, adults are not just large children, and I think adult assessment is legitimately its own specialty area. I may be especially well suited to assess adults who are also gender and sexual minorities, as this is a special area of focus for me.

My passion for assessment started with therapy. Over the past decade or so as a therapist I have seen more clients than I could ever count who have had absurd amounts of intervention that was not helpful because they had a missed diagnosis, a misdiagnosis, or no diagnosis despite having a clear clinical issue. As someone who delivers very specific therapies for specific conditions, identifying the most likely condition at hand was absolutely crucial, and so for the entirety of my career, assessment and diagnosis has been a very important part of my work.

These are more than just labels. While diagnosis and the DSM-5 have limitations and drawbacks that are important to understand, a careful and thorough assessment by a qualified diagnostician has a lot to offer: self understanding, connection to community, resources and accommodations, and a way of making sense of a person’s difficulties. Most importantly, there is a range of conditions (common ones!) for which there are effective treatments, but you have to know what the condition is to access them. I am not passionate about labels, but I am passionate about these benefits.

My primary specialty areas are OCD and Anxiety Disorders and I am going on about a decade of very high volume and focused work in these areas, which were areas of passion for me since I became a provisional psychologist. These are areas in which I have invested extra time and effort training, consulting with experts, and reading everything I can get my hands on, and in which I have done thousands of hours of diagnostic assessment and therapy. I now do lots of training, supervision, and specialty consultation for other clinicians in these areas.

I treat OCD as well as GAD (yes, it is a real disorder, not “just anxiety”), Phobias (especially emetophobia and blood and injection phobia), Social Anxiety, Panic Disorder and Agoraphobia.

Good treatment starts with accurate diagnosis, and this is emphasized by me and by all the people who work at Brown Psychological Services. Every single one of these disorders has a different specialized treatment protocol, and some have more than one. They are not all the same. Don’t get me started on this.

I have worked with all of the disorders identified in the DSM-5 as “OCD and Related Conditions” or OCRD. While OCD is the one that I work with most commonly, I also work with body dysmorphic disorder, hoarding, hair-pulling and skin-picking, and less common concerns that would be called “other specified” conditions that involve some form of obsessions or compulsive behaviour.

I work with developmental trauma, sexual trauma, and PTSD very frequently. I have worked with many clients with minority stress and trauma due to discrimination, particularly gender and sexual minorities. I also have special interest and experience in helping folks with avoidant attachment.

Many of my clients enter my practice with both trauma related and other diagnostic concerns.

I have accidentally gained quite a lot of experience working with folks with OCPD over the years, because it occurs in people with OCD at a high rate, and now I am able to comfortably diagnose and work with this condition. I’m passionate about helping clinicians sort out the distinctions between Autism, OCD, and OCPD, and providing treatment for people with one or more of these conditions that suits their values and treatment goals.  

Both Autism and ADHD occur at VERY high rates in folks who have other diagnoses I work with, which has meant that a lot of the therapy work I do is done with neurodivergent folks, and all the therapies I specialize in have been provided to folks with these diagnoses many many times.

Understanding these neurotypes and working with lots of Autistic/ADHD/AuDHD clients over the years has helped me build skills in providing the best clinical therapies available to folks with these diagnoses. While the assumption that because someone is Autistic they cannot benefit from first line treatments for OCD and other conditions is not supported by research, at times there are modifications to therapies that need to be made for neurodivergent people to benefit from them. I am forever working to make the best clinical treatments more accessible to neurodivergent people, and have high hopes that more research will soon be available to support this work.

While I don’t work with eating disorders as a broad category, I do work with two specific eating concerns.

Binge eating is another condition which commonly co-occurs with other diagnoses I treat. I treat binge eating frequently using targeted and structured treatment. If a person was looking for only binge eating work I would likely refer them to an eating disorder specialist, but if the binge eating is occurring with other conditions I specialize in, I will offer treatment for it.

I have also worked with adults with ARFID successfully, both aversive and avoidant subtypes.

Though I am not a mood disorder specialist, I have worked with lots of folks with bipolar disorder over the years, as well as many folks with depression and am competent at the diagnosis and treatment of both these disorders. I am also trained in the treatment of insomnia.

If you do not see your issue here, please feel free to be in contact to ask me about my experience in a particular area. There are many areas that I have experience in that I have not outlined here, such as maladaptive daydreaming, avoidant personality disorder, and other conditions. If I feel there is someone better suited to help you I will happily direct you to them.