Clinician’s guide to psychological assessment and testing: with forms and templates for effective practice

Standardized psychological testing is desirable for accurately determining the presence of a wide range of mental disorders. This book successfully attempts to provide a practical guide to conducting efficient and accurate psychological testing in clinical settings. It is divided into three sections: Processes, Standardized Psychological Tests, and Case Examples. Section I of the book presents useful templates which explain how to ensure critical information about assessment reports. Flow charts are seen to be useful in order to overview the entire process of assessment and standardised testing, from initiation to completion. In fact, using flow charts the mental health practitioner can easily find the most important points within this section. However, it would be helpful to have page numbers in the flowchart bullet points, in order to simplify the research process for professionals who have limited time in their everyday schedules. The very useful examples of forms and of report templates for initial psychological assessment that are given here lack page numbers to give the reader a quick reference to template examples. There are also useful explanations of the specific topics of test administration, of test scoring, of interpretation, of report writing and of communicating results. Overall this section is well organised with a lot of useful and detailed templates and forms; however, the structure is at times difficult to follow, and I found it hard to track references from the descriptive sections to the case examples. Regarding section II of this book, I found it convenient that each chapter has the same structure. This supports health practitioners in familiarising themselves better with the book, and aids in the navigation of the content. This section is schematic with very detailed tables and interpretation at the end of each chapter. It is extremely useful to the readers, allowing themselves to familiarise with the variety of the tests. This practical guide is based on the diagnostic criteria from the DSM-IV-TR which can be confusing for those mental health practitioners who are using DSM-5. However, the author repeatedly refers to the specific disorders, which helps the clinicians find the most suitable diagnostic test. The final section gives a sample of clinical cases, which comes from the author’s own caseload. This provides a positive impact of practice for the clinicians. Furthermore, each clinical case is described following the same template/ structure of the first section of the book. This is very useful for practitioners who want to see how to utilise the forms and tables illustrated in this book in real life. A brief overview of forensic psychology is also provided. Overall this is a very useful guide for clinicians who want a practical structure to follow in order to assess and to test patients. The author’s idea of structuring the last section of the book by following the forms, tables and templates of the previous theoretical two sections is very clever and gives a tangible meaning to real-life situations. Minor issues are linked to the lack of references within each section and to the use of DSM-IV-TR. This book would be most helpful for the clinical psychologists. Psychiatrists, nurses and other mental health professionals may also find useful material here.