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Test Overview
Mental health assessment is a series of tests and observations that a health professional uses to evaluate your behavior. Mental health assessment may include a physical exam, a psychiatric interview, laboratory tests (such as blood and urine tests), and specific mental health assessment tests.
During a mental health assessment, a health professional will evaluate your:
- Appearance and behavior.
- Mood (affect).
- Memory and thinking (cognition). This includes attention, concentration, level of consciousness, comprehension, and your ability to understand abstract ideas.
Thought processes and content. The health professional will evaluate your awareness of your surroundings (this is called orientation) and will determine whether you have an accurate understanding of time, place (where you are), and person (who you are). You will be asked whether you have had any suicidal thoughts, thoughts of hurting others, or strange and unreal thoughts (psychotic thoughts) or experiences, like hearing voices others don't hear or seeing things others don't see. - Ability to express yourself, by assessing your body posture, eye contact, and verbal expression.
- Physical functioning, by evaluating areas such as sleep, appetite, or physical
- symptoms.
- Insight and judgment.
- Relationships. The health professional will evaluate your ability to relate to others and will assess the status of the your present relationships.
