Mood & Mental Health Diagnostic Assessments

A low-cost, time-limited offering for 3–5 clients - intake begins Dec 1, 2025.

A clearer, more compassionate way of understanding yourself

There is so much power in having a clearer sense of what’s happening inside you. Clarity can create possibility. It can open doors. It can help you advocate for what you need, communicate with your care team, and choose supports that actually make sense for your life.
The problem is that the most common current avenues for assessment and diagnosis leave many people feeling overlooked, dismissed, or misunderstood. Especially for those who identify as a member of a  marginalized group, past encounters with assessment may have been oppressive or dehumanizing.

You deserve to understand your own mind in a way that feels grounding, affirming, and true. You deserve language that helps you make sense of your experiences — not shrink you. You deserve care that honours your history, your identities, and the wisdom you’ve already built by surviving this far.

Why people seek this kind of assessment

In my experience, people often come to this work because something isn’t feeling aligned. They may be feeling lost or wondering what’s going on that might provide a more cohesive explanation for their experience in the world. Sometimes people have been given a quick diagnosis like depression or anxiety by a GP, but the experience doesn’t quite match the label. Sometimes they’ve been on medication for a while and are wondering if it’s addressing the right thing. Sometimes they’re trying to explain their needs to a workplace, a university, or a doctor, but don’t yet have the language to describe what’s happening.

These assessments can be supportive for people navigating mood-related experiences such as depression, anxiety, trauma, OCD, or bipolar disorder. I will use the DSM to guide any diagnoses I provide but I will use it as only one tool alongside the entire context of your life. The purpose of doing so is to help you see your own story with more spaciousness and self-understanding, and open choices to you that may have been hard to see without this clarity.

What I Do Not Diagnose

These assessments cannot diagnose:

• Personality disorders
• Psychotic disorders
• Brain-related or neurocognitive disorders

For Autism or ADHD, it’s a bit more complicated. I can provide a provisional impression along with a summary of what we’re seeing – please contact me for more information if you think this might be part of your picture and we can explore further.
The assessments I provide at this time are not to be used for legal proceedings, and I cannot act as an expert witness or provide court-related letters.

My Approach

My approach to assessment is grounded in my ongoing commitment to feminist, anti-oppressive, relational, and somatic practice. Much like my therapy work, assessment is a collaborative process rather than a top-down expert model.
I believe:

• We cannot be neutral in systems shaped by colonialism, white supremacy, patriarchy, ableism, and capitalism.
• Our identities shape our interpretations, and transparency is part of ethical practice.
• You are the expert in your lived experience; assessment tools are simply one lens among many.
• Diagnostic language can be useful, but it must be handled with care and context.

Assessment should feel collaborative, respectful, and grounded in relationship. Together, we’re looking at your experiences with curiosity — including how past events, chronic stress, culture, identity, and systemic factors may be contributing to the challenges you’re facing now.

Because assessment has a long and harmful history, especially for Indigenous peoples and communities marginalized by systems, I want to name explicitly that I practice on Treaty 6 Territory and take care to continually decolonize and challenge traditional assessment practices. If there are cultural or identity-specific considerations you want centred in the process, I will hold that with respect.
As part of incorporating this new element into my practice, my supervisor Dr. Lauren Johnson R. Psych reviews my work and reports - an important part of providing ethical, high-quality assessment.

What to Expect

This assessment includes up to 3 hours of face-to-face time. During that time, I’ll ask questions, explore your history with you, and will include a few brief measures to help clarify patterns. We will likely also use a longer normed measure to help solidify the conclusions we come to and ensure we draw from as many sources of information as possible. The process is flexible, collaborative, and designed to help you walk away with a clearer understanding of what’s going on.

After meeting, we’ll schedule a 30-minute follow up summary call to walk through everything together. Following that, you’ll receive a 1–2 page written report summarizing what we explored. This includes any diagnoses (if present), a brief and clear narrative of your experiences, and recommendations for next steps. These might include therapy approaches that could be supportive, resources to explore, or considerations you can take to your doctor or workplace. If there are questions that would benefit from further assessment, I name those too.

Cost

For this limited pilot, I’m offering the assessment for a flat fee of $750. This is a temporary low-cost option, as full diagnostic assessments of this nature often cost around $3,000. The fee includes our meeting time, interpretation and differential diagnosis, any measures used, the written report, the summary call, and supervisor oversight.

If you’re looking for clarity, a sense of direction, or simply a more grounded understanding of what you’ve been carrying, you’re welcome to reach out to explore whether this offering fits your needs.