Can an adult who is reasonably suspected to have incurred brain damage through trauma such as a car wreck and who refuses to have appropriate evaluations done be forced to by, e.g., their parents? Must they demonstrate that they are a safety risk to themselves and others (such as randomly fainting/blacking out), some other requirement, or is it simply not possible to force it on them under the law?
I think that someone would have to be granted guardianship to be able to force them to do a neuropsych eval.
Even then though, I’d be hesitant to actually do it since it’s a grueling evaluation (around 6-8 hours of assessment) and if you don’t have a willing participant it’d be even more torture on the patient and the evaluator and the validity of the results would be called into question.
:eek: Just what does a neuropsych evaluations consist of?
Let’s just say that the neuropsychologists don’t want the anti-torture legislation to pass.
Ok, I kid, it’s really not that bad and while I was a student I actually enjoyed administering the assessments. Basically it’s a whole day of different things. Some neuropsychologists will have a fixed battery and will give the same things to every person, others are more flexible. Just to give you an idea of the kinds of things we looked at, the basic subheadings on reports that we wrote were: Orientation/Concentration/Attention; Sensory/Perceptual/Motor; Language (receptive and expressive); Memory (short term, longer term, visual and auditory); Construction/Praxis; Problem Solving; Interpersonal Interaction. We assessed each area with at least one tool.
Sadly, that sounds like fun. And I’d be curious about the results, too.
Does anyone else want one?
SenoraGO, how is it even possible to do all that with an uncooperative subject? :eek: Especially if all they do is decide to simply sit there and ignore the psychologist?
The simple answer is you can’t. If you get someone who just sits there and doesn’t do anything, then obviously you can’t do anything.
However, there are lots of shades of gray on the continuum of cooperativeness.
Some people were kind of in-between cooperative and uncooperative or who even shifted between the two throughout the day (most often because of fatigue or frustration with the task). Luckily, I’m a very persuasive person and was able to complete the evaluations with all of the patients that made it to the office on the day of the assessment, mostly because they’re already closer to the cooperate end of the spectrum simply because they showed up and could be talked into finishing the assessment.