Symptoms often manifest differently in children than they do in adults. Our goal is to look past the behavior to find the root cause:

• ADHD: It isn't just "hyperactivity." It often looks like a struggle to start tasks, losing items constantly, or an inability to "filter" distractions, even when the child wants to succeed.

• Anxiety: In children, anxiety frequently wears a mask of irritability or physical pain (like chronic stomach aches) rather than just "worry".

• Depression: Rather than sadness, many kids with depression appear angry, defiant, socially withdrawn, or lacking pleasure in things they used to enjoy.

• OCD: A child struggling to maintain attention may look like someone with ADHD, but if the reason is because they are obsessing, ruminating, or mentally checking, it may actually be OCD.

• Specific Learning Disorder (SLD): This may look like "laziness" or "avoidance," but it is actually a brain-based difficulty with specific skills like phonics, reading fluency, or number sense.

The brain is complex. Anxiety can cause a child to "blank out," which looks exactly like Inattentive type - ADHD.

Conversely, a student with an undiagnosed Learning Disorder may become depressed or anxious because they feel "slow" compared to peers.

A comprehensive evaluation helps untangle these overlapping threads, so we build the best plan that helps us target treatment in the right order.

Accurate diagnosis requires more than measuring a person’s symptoms against a checklist. Take ADHD for example. Someone can have trouble sustaining attention for a host of different reasons, and psychological testing allows us to assess a broad range of those reasons through the process called differential diagnosis. This process is necessary to be able to move forward in confidence as the testing process concludes. Simply meeting checklist requirements for a disorder does NOT guarantee accurate diagnosis or effective treatment.

Many offices use a single questionnaire to diagnose a child. At 417 Psych, we believe your child deserves more than a checklist. We use a comprehensive battery (WISC, WIAT, BASC, etc.) to look at IQ, academic skills, executive function, and emotional health. This "Gold Standard" approach helps prevent misdiagnosis and provides a psychological map so your child can get the right treatment quickly rather than spending valuable time and resources treating the wrong thing.

If you are seeking an evaluation that you plan to provide to the schools, your report will include DESE standards and discussion of “educational impact”. But there is something important to note. 417 Psych is a psychological setting where appropriately licensed professionals can provide psychological diagnoses according to the DSM-5-TR criteria. Missouri school districts operate under DESE (Department of Elementary and Secondary Education) standards, which are not the same standards used in medical settings. A psychological or medical diagnosis doesn't automatically guarantee school help. The school determines if the condition has an "educational impact". As a courtesy to our clients, we provide those specific Missouri standards in the reports to better position the client to have a meaningful discussion with the school. Our reports provide the school team with the exact data points they need to determine IEP or 504 eligibility from our perspective, but the appropriate school professionals will make the final decision as to eligibility and accommodations. We cannot guarantee that they will agree with our conclusions.

The reports at 417 Psych are designed to be a "plug-and-play" resource for schools. Parents can take the summary to a meeting to help the school team determine:

• Eligibility for an IEP or 504 Plan.

• Specific classroom accommodations (like extended time or quiet testing).

• Evidence-based interventions tailored to the child's unique cognitive profile.

Ultimately, the way school professionals choose to use the report is at their discretion.

We recommend telling your child that they are coming in to do some "brain puzzles" and activities to help us figure out how they learn best. We make the environment comfortable and low-pressure; there are no "grades," and we take plenty of breaks.

This is actually valuable data! As experts in child behavior, we are trained to observe how a child handles frustration or fatigue. If a child is truly unable to perform, we will pause and reschedule, but seeing how they "hit a wall" often provides the most insight into the support they need in the classroom.

Our pricing is consistent with industry standards, though we know it is a sizable cost to many families. Psychological testing has a lot of costs that are hidden to the consumer, including licensing fees, per-usage test protocol costs, specialized equipment, and time behind the scenes scoring, synthesizing and interpreting data, and writing reports. In fact, most of the costs are hidden to the consumer.

In traditional medical settings, insurance caps out what they will cover, often meaning that the evaluation is not truly comprehensive (which we find unacceptable) or the provider does not get appropriately compensated for their time (which is not a sustainable practice over time). Our commitment at 417 Psych is to provide an excellent product that does not cut corners or compromise on the very things that could result in an inaccurate diagnosis.