Bipolar | Psychosis | Autism | Personality Pathology | Broad-Spectrum Screening
Most of what gets missed in adult mental health is not missed because it is subtle. It is missed because the client comes in with a different presenting issue, so the clinician focusses on that and doesn’t have time to formally assess the 20 separate broad diagnostic classes in the DSM-5-TR, and over 300 diagnostic labels.
But imagine having a clear picture of how every adult client maps onto the DSM-5-TR, before they even walk through the door. This webinar will explore how that is possible, and the benefits of systematic screening.
Wednesday October 14, 7pm EDT | 6pm CDT | 4pm PDT 
Thursday 15 October, 10am AEST
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Free. Online webinar. Certificate of attendance provided.
Can’t make it live? Register anyway and we’ll send you the recording and the slides.
The consequences of missing a underlying mental disorder are measurable. For example, one in five adults presenting to mental health services with depressive symptoms in fact have a bipolar or bipolar-related disorder (Mak, 2009; Olfson et al., 2005), In autism, the pattern repeats: adults, and particularly women and gender diverse adults, arrive at a first diagnosis in their thirties or forties, having been treated for years for the anxiety and depression that sat on top of an unrecognised profile.
This webinar is about a structured way to improve assessment that does’t reply on clinical intuition. Dr Simon Baker and Dr David Hegarty will work through how a systematic, dimensional screening layer at intake changes what a clinician sees, and will use case studies to demonstrate the power of systematic screening.
Presenters Dr Simon Baker and Dr David Hegarty will explore:
By the end of this session, participants should be able to:
Dr Simon Baker is a Research Fellow at NovoPsych, where he researches and develops the psychological scales in NovoPsych’s assessment library, giving clinicians scientifically validated and clinically useful psychometric tools. His current focus is hierarchical assessment of psychopathology and adaptive testing.
Simon joined NovoPsych after 15 years in mental health research, spanning neuroimaging, digital mental health, prevention, implementation science, and service evaluation at Monash University, the Black Dog Institute, and Orygen.
Dr David Hegarty is a Registered Psychologist with over 20 years of experience working with children, teachers, and families as both an educator and a school psychologist. His career has included roles as a teacher, academic coordinator, and school psychologist across many schools, as well as private child and adolescent practice. His postgraduate training at the University of Sydney, including a Master of Health Science in Child and Adolescent Psychology and a PhD in computerised adaptive cognitive training, bridges direct experience with young people and a deep technical grounding in measurement and statistics.
David has particular interests in the development and validation of psychometric tools, and in the statistical foundations that determine how confidently a score can inform clinical decisions. He is especially focused on helping clinicians interpret assessment data with young people so that findings translate into usable, evidence-based decisions.
In his role as Head of Psychometrics at NovoPsych, and as an Adjunct Professional Fellow at Southern Cross University, David oversees scale development and contributes to the statistical methods behind the platform’s assessment tools. His focus is on keeping the measures clinicians rely on grounded in rigorous science while remaining accessible, interpretable, and clinically useful.
Start a free 15-day trial with full access to administer these assessments.
Broad-spectrum screening: Brief Hierarchical Taxonomy of Psychopathology (B-HiTOP)
Personality: Personality Inventory for DSM-5 – Short Form (PID-5-SF)