Well if saying that makes you feel better about your training, that's great.
I don't know what this is about, because you are presumably here because you want to be a psychologist? It's a little too early to become self-hating.
Anyway, your poo-pooing of certain methods within psychiatry/clinical psychology is not only naive, but also bolsters the notion that
more (as in the additional of psychological test data) is better/preferable in terms of clinical assessment in all cases. The more data points, the better, right? Well, not so fast. Incremental validity is at play, as is cost, time (both yours and the patients), diminishing returns, and spurious correlates.
Although reasonable psychologists can disagree, there is a case to be made that neuropsychological testing provides no incremental value in the assessment of suspected AD/HD, at least if rule-outs that would necessitate testing (Learning disorders, TBI effects, other neuro insults) are not at play. Now, it is true that people with ADHD are a bit more likely to have certain cognitive profiles than are people without ADHD. For example, people with ADHD, on average, tend to score
slightly lower on tests of working memory, processing speed, and verbal fluency than on tests of visual–spatial reasoning, fluid reasoning, and crystallized intelligence. However, most people with ADHD do not have this particular profile and most people with this profile do not have ADHD. In the end, a diagnosis of ADHD cannot be ruled in by any particular cognitive profile, nor can any particular cognitive profile rule it out. I do still advocate the use of standardized measures (with norms) in the assessment of suspected AD/HD (not extensive IQ testing or cognitive assessment), as well as symptom validity too, however. However, the key to this disorder, as with so many others (schizoaffective disorder, personality disorders, etc) is the HISTORY. The clinical interviews importance should not underestimated.
If your response to all this is something along the lines of: "Yea, well what do you but what they tell you?" I would simply direct you to my response the last time you griped about this.
If you are, as suggested by the above post, unhappy about lack of biomarker, labs, phenotypes, etc. for psychiatric illnesses, then this field will be a huge disappointment.
