Psychological Assessments

Psychological Assessments are important for assessing problems, goals, and diagnoses. As such, these tasks are essential for therapy. Having quick executables and references would be a boon for psychotherapeutic interventions.

I want to emphasize that these assessments require training, so they are conducted in a more human, personable way. Only use these executables if you are a practitioner, training to be one, or have been approved to perform these in research. If you are interested in this field, you can still read about, learn about, and play around with them; don’t use them to diagnose or treat. So, say you’re an RA in college, and you think your student has depression. Please don't use the assessments here; instead, speak with your supervisor for advice and, if helpful, encourage them to visit the campus counseling center. And in your free time or schoolwork, try the tasks out. It is important to gatekeep these tasks so that qualified people can use them, but you can still totally learn from them to become qualified.

Finally, I do not own nor did I create the original assessments. All of these tasks are in the public domain or can be reproduced in the public domain.

Mental Status Examination: This is for assessment during an intake. I included a place where you can take notes, which is important for references and providing evidence.

Paitient Health Questionnaire-9: This is a commonly used assessment tool that can screen for depression and the severity of depression. It’s commonly used in research as well.

Columbia Suicide Risk Assessment: A task designed to evaluate the risk of suicide. Ask the questions verbatim, and I included a basic outline for safety planning in the sidebar.

Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7: A seven-question inventory for anxiety screening.

CAGE: These are four questions you can ask to evaluate substance abuse patterns. It is a screening questionnaire, so if they score highly, you will need to move to a more comprehensive assessment, such as the MAST. That can be said about all of these tasks. No one task or questionnaire will give you a complete assessment of a person for treatment or forensic evaluations, but you probably already knew that.

Young Mania Rating: This is often used in hospital settings after someone has experienced or is currently experiencing a manic episode. Based on observations so training is required.

Michigan Assessment Screening Tool-Alcohol and Drugs: The MAST is a commonly used psychometric scale to screen for drug and alcohol abuse. (Even though alcohol is a drug, it’s listed separately to fit better into the nomenclature)

University of Rhode Island Change Assessment: This scale measures where someone is in the stages of change in the psychotherapeutic process. This can help measure where your client is in their psychotherapeutic development, particularly regarding how they feel about their problem.

McLean Screening Instrument for Borderline Personality Disorder: This is a screening tool for Borderline Personality Disorder. This is just a screening tool, and a higher score merely suggests that you seek treatment and an official diagnosis. But it is effective for research.

Alcohol Use Disorder Identification Test: The AUDIT is a tool used to assess Alcohol use disorder with 10 questions based on the person’s experience they had over the last 12 months.

Suicide Behaviors Questionnaire-Revised: The SBQ-R is a tool that is used to assess suicidal behaviors. The cutoff score varies by population, but the code was built around the general population, with a cutoff score of 7.

Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale: The BPRS is a scale used to rate a person’s symptoms of schizophrenia. This is based on observations and thus requires training to know how to rank the bheaviors seen. Similar to the PANSS, but the PANSS is not in the public domain while the BPRS is.

NEO-120: This is a shortened version of the OCEAN personality assessment. The OCEAN (Big Five) personality traits are among the most valid ways to assess personality, so creating an executable file for them was essential.

Need for Cognitive Scale: This tool measures a person’s natural tendency to explore difficult mental topics and their desire for mental challenges. Coming Soon.

Hamilton Depression and Anxiety Rating Scale: As MDD and GAD are frequently co-occurring, the HAM-AD is useful to assess both symptomologies at once. This scale does that. Coming Soon.