The Full Informed Consent: Child mental health assessments

Many parents enter child mental health care assuming that assessment, testing, and evaluation will lead to greater clarity regarding their child’s diagnosis, core problem, and optimal treatment. After all, blood draws, cultures, biopsies, and advanced imaging modalities, like CT-scans and X-rays, are hallmarks of American (bio)medicine. However, child mental health care is not like other medical specialties, for which tests and assessments might definitively point to a root cause of pathology with few if any risky “side effects.”