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.
