Affordable neuropsychological testing for 9yo

I had a neuropsych assessment done for my son thru our HMO.  It was not easy to get it out of them, because they pretty much told me that one would have to suffer a head injury and be truly incapacitated mentally to get one.  However, my son had so many unusual symptoms, including physical pain in his early teens, and memory lapses where he'd know something very well only to say he had no idea what it was the next day (and I thought he pretended not to remember, and we both ended up in tears!).  I asked several times, several doctors, first a psych therapist, then a developmental doctor, then a therapist again, until they gave us an assessment.  It was done by a resident doctor, under supervision of their regular doc.  It sounded like our HMO had only one doctor who is able to perform neuropsych evals for the whole Northern California, so I think having a resident to help out was one of the factors in their decision to provide us an eval.

You can make your case persuasive enough, especially if your school has an experience with something like this, which I hope they do, otherwise they are just throwing words around without knowing what they really mean. They should know what a neuropsych assessment will provide, and give enough reasons for why your son needs it.  What about the school district?  Did your son have an IEP? Do they think he needs a neuopsych, as a team, or is it just a school administrator or teacher who's suggesting it?

Regarding what you get out of an assessment, for us it was a lot of interesting information about our son, some of it rather useful. For example, we found that he has very slow processing speed, which explained a lot about him acting out in class, or getting frazzled when he was called on without much warning, or spent hours on something that should take minutes for a "regular" kid. They have scales for all kinds of things, like visual and hearing perception. I forget everything they included, and I had a learning specialist review a draft before I agreed on the final assessment.  I can give you more info if you want, just ask the moderator for my contact info.  In the end, we used the assessment to prepare a 504 plan for my son's school, and it's been hugely helpful to have it.  Plus, it has been helpful to me to understand my son's strengths and weaknesses as detailed by the evaluation, and adjust my expectations of him and be able to help him better to cope with his issues.

All that said, the evaluation is not able to tell you the entire "truth" about your kid. As anything, it's somewhat subjective, and is affected by how your child performs on the days it happens (in our case, it took two separate sessions on two different days, because my son got too tired to go through the whole thing in one sitting).

Also, you can find a lot of helpful info in books. I got one of them, specific to slow processing speed, but it has a section on neuropsych evals and what they provide,etc.  Maybe you can find it or something like it in the library: "Bright Kids Who Can't Keep Up: Help Your Child Overcome Slow Processing Speed and Succeed in a Fast-Paced World".

Take care, and good luck. Things work out, our kids grow up. And they do get better, especially when we parents invest our time and our selves in making that happen.

I would contact Radha Richmond - she is a Licensed Educational Psychologist who does neuropsychological testing as well as other tests for learning disabilities and the emotional piece too- and she is great because she was a teacher and has worked with kids for years so she has the practical application to schools and the learning piece as well. I don't know what you consider affordable but she is reasonable and well worth it! 

I think her website is www.eastbayedpsych.com. 

The Wright Institute in Berkeley has sliding scale assessment services. 

Good neuropsych testing should be helpful. Get specific questions from teachers and formulate your own so the Psychologist knows what your need to know. You should also try Access institute in the city and Ann Martin Center in Emeryville

I looked into this about a year ago for my 2nd grader. It is so expensive. Even the "affordable" option through UC Berkeley was ridiculous (sorry, I don't remember the price tag because I basically fainted when they finally told me after 2 weeks of phone tag with the interns). If a public school is recommending neuropsych testing, they should provide it. Since you didn't say that, sounds like you are in private school, and then, yes, it's on you. My best suggestion is to try to find someone working on their PhD who will do it independently at a lower cost, but then perhaps you run the risk of the school not accepting the results. My second best suggestion is to tell the school flat out you can't afford it, and can you break up the pieces to get at what the main concerns are in the school setting, and perhaps pay a therapist for a couple sessions - I assure you, that will be MUCH cheaper than a full neuropsych eval. Good luck!

I believe the Ann Martin center has a sliding scale http://www.annmartin.org