Person to Paper
Can Psychological Tests Capture the Essence of a Person?
I walk into a room and am greeted by an estranged woman, I am handed a package, told to fill out the information, then to bring it back to the woman. I sit filling out this questionnaire. There must be forty questions. Each question has an abundance of choices. Some in a Likert scale format asking me to choose whether I strongly disagree, disagree, neither agree or disagree, agree, or strongly agree. Others ask me how often I do certain activities. I sit in this almost silent room full of strangers filling out the same questionnaire, feeling just as awkward as I do and wanting to blend into the walls just as much as I do. As I sat there I found myself second-guessing each answer I penciled in. Was this an accurate representation of myself? Was I being too hard on myself or was I being too easy on myself? What would the person evaluating my mental state think of each of my responses? This was my experience at McGill Counselling Services.
Having experienced such internal conflict about each an every answer I put down for this questionnaire I can only help but question the validity of psychological diagnostic tests. Furthermore, how reliable can this testing possibly be with clinical populations? I was a student, in touch with reality, going to apply for entrance into a free counselling service, for minor problems such as test and anxiety and school stress. Can clinical patients who have lost touch with reality reliably respond to such questionnaires? These people also have more at stake: getting admitted to psychiatric care that they may desperately need to stay alive, being released from psychiatric care or perhaps even their placement in prison (whether they go into a psychiatric ward or into the general population).
Of course I would be naïve to think that the questionnaire I received at McGill Counselling is the same as the questionnaires clinical populations or alleged criminals are receiving to decide their fate. My questionnaire responses were likely not a valid or reliable representation of who I was. I was in a stressed, uncomfortable, and awkward state, seconding-guessing and hyper-analyzing each of my responses. If my responses as a non-clinical patient in a low stakes situation weren’t valid or reliable how can we expect those of clinical patients to be reliable?
My point is how can any piece of paper capture the entire essence of a human, the intricacies of their psyches and pathologies? From my experience I don’t think they can. Even if these tests were not self-reports but rather administered by psychiatric professionals, it is impossible to capture everything important in a person’s diagnosis through a test. Even after years of working with patients there are still debates over which diagnosis a patient should receive; there are debates over the criteria for each diagnosis.
Don’t get me wrong, I understand the importance of psychological testing. As humans we often rely on categorizing to wrap our mind around the complexities of the world, that’s just how our brains function best. We can’t get very far in helping people with mental illnesses if we don’t have a label to put on these illnesses and a way of assigning people to each of these labels. Psychological testing has done great things in the field of psychiatry. However, their validity and reliability only stem so far.
