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Q: Neuropsychological Testing
My 17 year old son was diagnosed BP this past summer after a bad manic episode.
We recently asked his psychiatrist if my son should have neuropsycholigical testing done. He is having terrible difficulty in
school (he can't really function at school). Dr. said that he needs to be
stable first. Then she would start with psychological testing. If
the results warrent neuro, they would proceed further. She also told us
that we might just have to write this year off for school. He is obviously
having deficits in different areas of his brain. We want to help. What to
do?
Dear Ms. C' --
Neuropsychological tests include a wide variety of routine tests to look at
several different aspects of brain function. Because often the question
being asked is "how are we doing?", i.e. "is there any area of
function that's really not looking too good here?", the number of tests is
often quite high. And thus the cost is pretty high too. That leads
doc's who are paying attention to the cost of medical care generally to worry
about doing these tests too often. And that leads to a desire to delay
until the maximal improvement can be achieved, because if you test before that
and then your son gets better, you wouldn't want decisions being made on the
basis of the now-dated tests. You probably have figured all that out
already.
A different situation arises sometimes when we want to
use the tests to demonstrate in concrete terms just how bad things are right
now. This could be for some kind of disability determination,
including for school placement or other decisions about school; or in adults,
for disability insurance evaluations. In this situation, you might be able
to pick the area you think is looking worst, and confine the testing to that
area (e.g. attention; or memory), which would make it cheaper and thus maybe
lower barriers to doing it both now and again later.
Finally, the school might need it to decide what
particular education plan to craft for him. Under these circumstances it's
not unusual for the school to end up paying for this, if they don't have their
own psychologist to do the testing. So if that was the primary need, you
could gently facilitate the school concluding that this was warranted now.
Good luck with all that. I hope I caught the
question correctly.
Dr. Phelps
Published January, 2003
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