Types of Mental Health Assessments

Mental health assessments are used to determine whether or not a person has a mental illness. Mental health assessments usually work by exclusion, arriving at the conclusion of mental health after ruling out the possibility of mental illness. There are several types of mental health assessments, including personality disorder tests, mental illness tests and cognitive assessments.

Personality

• Personality tests can be used to assess mental health and determine personality disorders, such as avoidant personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. A personality disorder is a highly persistent and continuous mental health issue that affects a person's ability to interact normally with others. Many people who have personality disorders fail to seek out medical help, thinking that their behavior is normal and that other people are wrong.

Disability

• Mental disabilities are not the same as mental illnesses, but are assessed using mental health instruments. Many patients with Asperger's syndrome are initially screened for schizophrenia, as the two conditions have some symptoms in common. Patients who show certain symptoms, such as paranoia, excitability and social withdrawal, are tested using medical history reviews, IQ tests and personality tests, and are categorized as disabled or mentally ill, depending on the results.

Neuropsychological

• Mental health can be tested using neurological assessment tools, such as brain scans, electric brain imaging and MRIs. Certain mental illnesses, such as schizophrenia and depression, have strong physiological correlation in the patient's brain, such as under or overactive dopamine receptor site activity. A comprehensive brain scan, using various imaging technologies, can add considerable weight to a diagnosis of schizophrenia or depression.

Cognitive

• Cognitive assessments are sometimes used to assess mental health. In most cases, cognitive assessments, such as IQ tests and aptitude tests, are used to rule out physiological conditions, such as brain damage, before a diagnosis of mental illness is given. Certain conditions, including schizoid personality disorder, correlate reasonably well with average to above average IQ. Cognitive assessments can be useful in distinguishing between mental impairment and mental illness, and thus are essential tools in thorough mental health testing.

Situational Problems

• Some mental health problems are temporary or situational in nature. Conditions such as trauma and post-traumatic stress disorder are often assessed by reviewing events in the patient's life, as they can only be diagnosed with reference to an external cause. Other tools, such as personality testing and cognitive testing, are used in addition to the case history approach. Thus, the assessment process for situational problems is very much holistic in nature.