The Riggs Difference: Where Understanding Leads to Recovery
Psychological Testing
Psychological testing during the initial six-week evaluation and treatment period provides an in-depth assessment used to inform your treatment. The assessment process helps us get to know you in a way that we value and also helps you get to know the treatment team and how we work.
An Individualized Approach To Testing
Our psychological testing process is unique and thoroughly individualized. Using both personality and cognitive tests, our psychologists aim to describe your experiences, outline your characteristic ways of thinking and feeling, and understand the ways you try to manage what troubles you.
The results of the tests are included as part of the case conference that occurs near the end of the initial six-week evaluation and treatment period and provide an opportunity to look past what we can observe explicitly and try to make sense of more implicit personality traits. Psychologists work to integrate what is learned from the testing process into the evolving understanding of you and your struggles.
While you may have completed some of the tests we use before, we offer each patient a full, fresh, and thoughtful re-evaluation. Sometimes we are able to use data from a recent assessment, if available.
If you stay a year or more, you may be re-tested with a focus on evidence of change.
Select Psychological Testing Publications
- (2021). Ridenour, J. Psychoanalytic psychological testing in residential and hospital-based settings. In Yalof, J. A. & Bram, A. D. Psychoanalytic Assessment Applications for Different Settings
- (2019) Churchill, H. & Ridenour, J. Coming together through falling apart: Using psychological assessment within a developmental framework to assess change, Rorschachiana, 40(2), 151-168.
- (2019) Biedermann, C., Ridenour, J., & Biel, S. Psychodynamic psychological testing in the mental health inpatient setting: A way of listening, learning, and holding patients and psychotherapists. In M. Turel, M., Siglag, M., & Grinshpoon, A. (Eds.). Clinical Psychology in the Mental Health Inpatient Setting: International Perspectives (pp. 293-308). Routledge: New York, NY.
Your Treatment Experience
While your treatment will reflect your own choices, all of our residential treatment programs start with intensive psychotherapy as the core, and include a range of complementary elements.
Admission Process
We focus on understanding the psychological dilemmas that underlie symptomatic behavior so that people can increasingly take charge of their lives.
Learn More About Admission