The Role of Psychological Testing in Residential Depression Treatment

One of the most important tasks of treating a patient who comes for residential depression or anxiety treatment  is sorting out the factors contributing to their problem. 

It is not unusual to find that the patients who come for residential treatment of their anxiety or depression, have not previously undergone a full psychological assessment.

This type of assessment makes use of standardized tests to evaluate the various areas that makes an individual able to manage the many challenges they face in everyday life. 

There are many specific areas of functioning that, when impaired, can lead to recurrent negative results including irresolvable anxiety and depression. For example, deficits in specific cognitive skills can leave a person struggling to manage academic and employment responsibilities that their peers take in stride. The resulting negative comparisons between themselves and their peers can create a negative self concept and psychological distress. Such distress can begin a downward spiral as the individual seeks relief from their psychological pain through substances or other maladaptive means.

What we find is that an individual’s substance abuse may have begun as a desperate attempt to self-medicate feelings of depression that arose from the inability to keep up with their peers due to a learning disability, cognitive deficit, or other processing anomaly such as dyslexia. 

In other cases an otherwise bright individual might not be able achieve their potential due to the deficits created by deficient attention and/or hyperactivity. Still other difficulties such distorted thought processing or perceptual inaccuracies can create a lifetime of negative results that lead to anxiety, depression, substance abuse, and other maladaptive efforts to quell their pain. 

This is why we offer our patients the opportunity to undergo a full psychological evaluation that assesses their levels of intellectual, academic, and socioemotional functioning in order to fully account for all the potential sources of their difficulties.