2 mins

What is the difference between a psychological and psychiatric assessment?

Video Description

Elena Touroni, a private psychologist based in Chelsea, describes the differences between a psychological and psychiatric assessment, in particular that a psychiatrist will also look into your physical health. https://www.thechelseapsychologyclinic.com Chelsea Psychology Clinic are a group of London psychologists and psychiatrists offering private psychological therapy and psychiatry treatment from their premises across central London and Chelsea. The private therapy sessions cover the following areas: – Acceptance & Commitment Therapy – Cognitive Analytic Therapy – Cognitive-behavioural Therapy – Couples Therapy – Dialectical-behaviour Therapy – Mentalisation Based Treatment – Mindfulness Based Cognitive Therapy – Schema Therapy

Video Transcription

A psychological assessment is an assessment in which we focus on your presenting problems and a lot of the background history to those. We try to understand your family, your relationships, whether you’ve had therapy before, what kind of difficulties you’ve had historically in your life, and we try to build a picture of you. So just to get a bit of a sense of how you’ve come to have the difficulties that you have just now in the context of your life story. And on the basis of that, we develop what we call a formulation of your difficulties. So it’s a little bit like putting the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle together and trying to come up with a new picture that gives you a better understanding of yourself. A psychiatric consultation has some added components to it which is that if you have a mental disorder that might benefit from medication, we will also look into your physical health. And we’ll look into whether your symptoms, perhaps, have the level of severity that psychological therapy alone might be too difficult to treat with. Hence, we will look at medication and how that could be of help. So that’s the additional component of a psychiatric consultation. Also in a psychiatric consultation, people can be given a diagnosis of their difficulties. Whereas, in psychological assessment, we focus much more on formulating your difficulties in a very individual way, so much more understanding you as a person rather than giving you a particular diagnosis.

Dr Elena Touroni

Dr Elena Touroni

19 June 2022

"Dr. Elena Touroni is a skilled and experienced Consultant Psychologist with a track record of delivering high-quality services for individuals with all common emotional difficulties and those with a diagnosis of personality disorder. She is experienced in service design and delivery, the management of multi-disciplinary teams, organisational consultancy, and development and delivery of both national and bespoke training to providers in the statutory and non-statutory sector."

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Dr Stacie Tay

Dr Stacie Tay attained her BSc (Hons) Psychology at the University of Nottingham and worked as a psychologist at the Institute of Mental Health, Singapore, before returning to the UK to complete her Doctorate in Clinical Psychology at the University College London.   

Dr Tay has worked in a variety of settings within the NHS for more than eight years, including primary and secondary care, specialist psychological services and forensic inpatient settings. She currently works as a Clinical Psychologist at the North East London Foundation Trust.  

She has extensive experience working with individuals and groups, providing evidence-based psychological therapies including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), Interpersonal Psychotherapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), Compassion Focused Therapy (CFT) and Mindfulness-based approaches as well as Schema-informed therapy.   

Dr Tay’s clinical experience involves working with people who present with a range of mild to severe mental health difficulties. This includes depression, anxiety (OCD, social anxiety, panic disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, health anxiety, phobia-related disorders, PTSD), stress related issues, low self-esteem, complex trauma, interpersonal difficulties, grief and bereavement, and long-term health conditions.