Fun day at the "shrink" - part 2

As I mentioned in yesterday's posting. I had to have a Psychological Evaluation yesterday in preparation for LAP Band surgery.

Today I wanted to write a little bit about the actual appointment and testing to help others who may be considering surgery to understand the process.

It was quite painless.

I am sure every Doctor is different, but my evaluation was in two parts.  First a basic interview with the Doctor and then some tests.

The interview part was just some basic family history questions. (how many siblings, birth order, parents get along etc)

He didn't get into weird stuff like you see in the movies like how old I was when I was potty trained. LOL.

It was basic conversation to ensure I was sane.

He asked what was the date, year, season etc.

We also discussed the surgery so he could determine how prepared I was for the undertaking.

Keep in mind the main reason for this evaluation is to determine if the person seeking treatment is able to follow through with the treatment. It is a major life change and people need to be able to handle it.

Anyway, the only tests he personally administered were he asked me to remember three words and then a few minutes later he asked for them to be recited back.

He also asked me to spell 'world' forward and backward. Backward was a little trickier that I expected.

I also had to replicate a few shapes from a piece of paper onto a blank page.

And that was the extent of the interview part.

Next I had to take 3 quizzes.

The first one (MMPI-2) was over 500 questions but thankfully he had me do the just first 370 questions. That was a bit tedious and some of the questions were pretty extreme but it looks for overall mental health with questions that will determine depression, anxiety as well as more major illness.
	The 2nd test was  was (MBMD) This was only about 150 questions and was very similar to the first test.
The last test was an eating inventory and it looked for eating patterns. It had questions about emotional eating or depression eating. It was only about 30 questions.

This whole process took less than 2 hours.

If you have been avoiding surgery because of fear of this, don't be afraid

It was less of a hassle than the colonoscopy that I also had to do for this
surgery.