Psychiatric Evaluations

At Amen Clinics, we take a balanced and all-encompassing approach to assessment and healing. As part of our psychiatric evaluation process, we look at the following 4 Circles, all of which can have a meaningful impact on your mental health/brain health.

• Biological: We will assess how your physical body and brain function, including your genetics, any illnesses or chronic conditions, any head injuries or concussions, exposure to any toxins, lifestyle habits, diet, exercise, and more.
• Psychological: We will explore your thinking patterns, developmental issues, and any emotional traumas you have experienced.
• Social: We will delve into your social support network and look at the nature of your relationships with family, friends, coworkers, or schoolmates. Do your relationships add stress to your life? Do you feel connected to others or do you feel isolated?
• Spiritual: We will search for what’s important to you and what gives you a sense of meaning and purpose in your life. It’s important for you to know why you care and what is motivating you to get healthy.

How can we know what is going on inside your brain unless we look? The brain imaging technology we use at Amen Clinics is called SPECT and it tells us 3 important things:

• Areas of the brain that work well.
• Areas of the brain that don’t work hard enough.
• Areas of the brain that work too hard.

SPECT brain scans provide extremely valuable insight. They connect the dots between your brain function, behaviors and symptoms, which helps our doctors create an individualized treatment plan that is effectively targeted to meet your needs.

Our brain imaging work has also helped identify patterns in the brain that are associated with mental health conditions. It shows that mental illnesses are NOT simple or single disorders. One size does NOT fit all. Treatment that works for one person won’t work for everybody, and it could even make you worse!

Brain scans can reveal damage from head trauma, even if you never blacked out and were never diagnosed with a concussion. Head injuries put you at greater risk for anxiety and depression, ADD/ADHD, PTSD, addiction, and memory problems. But if nobody ever looks at your brain, they can’t know that these conditions are related to past head trauma. To overcome these conditions, you must heal your damaged brain. Psychiatric medications alone won’t work!

With the world’s largest database of functional brain scans — 160,000 and growing — from patients from all 50 states and 120 countries, our physicians are able to more accurately evaluate and diagnose patients. The ability to identify the specific type of a mental health/brain health condition and to see evidence of head trauma (or toxic exposure or infection) also makes our physicians better able to target more effective treatment to your needs.

An important part of the psychiatric evaluation at Amen Clinics involves the use of two neuropsychological tests (Conner’s Continuous Performance Test-II and WebNeuro), which give us additional insights into how your brain functions.

• The Conner’s Continuous Performance Test-II helps to assess focus, response speed, and impulse control.
• WebNeuro measures domains of function in thinking, feeling, emotion, and self-regulation. It includes tests for mood, anxiety, attention, and memory.

Your overall biological wellness plays a powerful role in your mental health/brain health. For example, if your hormones are out of balance, your mood and mental clarity will be out of balance too—and no amount of antidepressants or stimulants are going to help!

When appropriate, we will order a set of diagnostic lab tests to measure your important health numbers. Depending on your individual needs, we may also order genetic testing or more extensive lab work.