Brandon Gimbel (00:00)

I know I have referred people for neuropsychological testing when I'm stumped, when the patient and I are trying to figure out what's happening and we don't have a clear idea and we need help. Often, one that I'm sure you get a fair amount, it's the question of, is this person anxious or do they have ADHD?

Lisa Novak (00:16)

Yeah, it is one of the most common and one of the most complicated questions that we get. And part of what we're relying on is the early developmental history. But then when they come to do the testing with us, there are patterns we can see in the data that don't generally seem like they can be explained by anxiety alone. Or they can, and then that tells the story. One example would be there are measures that look at executive functions where we're maybe doing what looks like just a memory test, but we're actually assessing how the person is acquiring information. Are they using an effective strategy? Is it very haphazard? Are they organizing the information, or are they just grabbing onto whatever it is that they hear last, because that's what sticks most in their mind? And when we look at those themes and those patterns in the data itself, it starts to clarify the picture for us.

Brandon Gimbel (01:09)

That's interesting because as psychiatrists, we don't have access to that. You're collecting more information that sounds extraordinarily rich.

Lisa Novak (01:15)

It's fun. I smile a lot when I talk about what we do, but it really is like putting the pieces of a puzzle together, which you can see in my background. But that's honestly what it feels like, that we are taking these little bits of this person's story and then we're adding to it with all of the other data that we're collecting to put together a cohesive whole.