My career has evolved over the time since I got my Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology in 1981. For the first fifteen years, I worked as a therapist in a variety of outpatient settings in Boston, Philadelphia, and South Jersey. Over the years I have worked with hundreds of children, adolescents, and adults with a wide variety of concerns in individual, couples, and family therapy.
In the mid-1990’s, I developed an interest in neuropsychology, and it has become the focus of my work. I went back to school and earned a Post-Doctoral Certificate in Neuropsychology from Drexel University. After that, I was the neuropsychologist at Centra, a well-known multi-disciplinary group practice in Marlton, New Jersey, for nearly twenty years, before starting my own private practice. I test children, adolescents, and adults with a variety of issues including ADHD/ADD, learning disorders, post-concussion syndrome, and autism spectrum disorders, including what used to be known as Asperger’s Disorder.
Neuropsychological testing yields an enormous amount of information. Some of this is in the form of scores which compare the person’s performance to the performance of other people their age or to their own performance on other tasks. You can use these scores to look for patterns of strengths and weaknesses. Analyzing the different kinds of errors that people make gives you equally important information. For example, you can get an item wrong because you just were not able to do it at all, or you can get it wrong because you did it correctly but too slowly, or you can get it wrong because you did most of it correctly but you didn’t notice a “careless error”, etc. Even though all of these errors lead to the same score, they each mean very different things. In addition to doing this type of error analysis, I look very carefully at the process by which people go about solving the various problems I give them to solve. This “process approach” also leads to a more in depth analysis of the test findings. What could be more interesting than the human brain and how it works?
Perhaps my favorite part of my work is doing feedback sessions in which I share the results of the testing and my recommendations with the client (and family members as well if appropriate) and give them an opportunity to ask questions. I work hard to explain the findings in a way which makes sense to people and to answer as many questions as they have. Often, these sessions are almost like therapy in that people come to see things about themselves or their loved ones in a new light and to understand things which have always puzzled them in the past. Parents are often afraid that their children will have a difficult time handling the feedback, but I have found that most people, including children, feel validated by the process. Usually, the person has always known the things I am saying but has not been able to put their knowledge into words or understand what it means. Sadly, often they have interpreted these aspects of themselves as a unique weakness or as an indication that things are hopeless. Giving these issues a label, letting them know that other people can and do cope with the same problems, and giving them strategies for attacking the problems can be a huge relief. That is a large part of what I find so satisfying about my work.