Before a therapist can come to the decision of whether or not to give a patient a specific diagnosis. A therapist would have to first have to meet with the patient by conducting an interview to obtain an idiographic understanding. Which means the therapist needs to get to know the patient. And at this point the therapist needs to get the patient to sign medical release forms. Therefore, the therapist can get as much previous medical history as possible to help with the assessment. It is very important that a therapist completes an initial assessment before moving forward with a treatment plan. An initial assessment is a collection of all the necessary information before finding a diagnosis. Within the assessment process a clinical assessment is completed to narrow down the thoughts as to why a person is acting out with abnormal behavior. Standardize, testing that is used to determine where a patient may stand when completing a different test. Once the test is completed, they are then compared to “normal” behavior. Reliability is the term that is used to measure the consistency of testing results. The last but not least …show more content…
During a clinical test a person’s psychological functioning from which broader information about the person can be inferred. There are a number of different other tests that are done to determine a person’s diagnosis, however, we are going to skip over to personality inventory. Personality inventories, is a test structured to determine a broader understanding of a person’s personality characteristic (beliefs, feelings that people evaluate as either characteristic or uncharacteristic of them, and consisting statements about behaviors) (Comer, 2014, p. 424).Which gives a therapist a chance to answer a number of questions. Once the questions are answered the therapist can then draw some type of conclusions about psychological