TPP 299a: Dr. Jonine Nazar-Biesman on Navigating the Neuropsych Evaluation Process
episode
Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
41 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed just now
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What should parents consider when choosing a neuropsychologist for their child?
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Hey, it's Debbie. For the month of January, Playback Friday episodes are focused on navigating neuro psychs and assessments. If understanding and integrating what you're learning about your child feels like an ongoing part of your world, these episodes will offer guidance for the next steps. Welcome to Tilt Parenting, a podcast featuring interviews and conversations aimed at inspiring, informing, and supporting parents raising differently wired kids. I'm your host, Debbie Reber. And I know that the neuropsych assessment process can be incredibly daunting and complicated to navigate. So I'm excited to share this conversation with pediatric and adolescent young adult neuropsychologist, Dr. Jonine Nazar-Biesmann.
As you'll hear, Jonine's work is about taking into consideration the whole child and looking at the big picture when assessments are being done. Dr. Nizar Beesman has over 25 years of experience specializing in assessing and treating children, adolescents, and young adults. She works closely with families, treatment teams, schools, and the community to ameliorate social, emotional, behavioral, and educational challenges. Jonine also specializes in forensic neuropsychology to assess damages due to traumatic brain injury, birth insults and environmental toxins. And now here's my conversation with Dr. Jonine Nazar-Beesman.
Hey,
Janine, welcome to the
podcast. Hi, Debbie. Thanks so much for having me.
I think this is an interesting and maybe overdue conversation that we're going to have today because it has been a couple of years, maybe even four years, since we really explored the assessment and evaluation process. And I think there are some things that have probably changed, or I know there are questions that have come up because of COVID that my listeners will be interested in as well. But I would love, as a way to start, if you could just tell us in your own words, a little bit about the work that you do in the world. And I always love to know either your personal why for doing it or where you find the most joy in the work that you're doing.
So I'm a pediatric, an adolescent, young adult neuropsychologist, which means that the training goes beyond just typical clinical psychology into a couple of years of postdoc understanding brain development and Neural circuitry, how things wire up and the why I went into that specialty is just truly fascination about the brain and how it governs and operates everything and truly understanding things from a brain perspective. how behavior is shaped by what the brain is doing.
How can parents effectively vet and interview potential evaluators?
So I think the favorite part of my day is just sitting with students, chatting with them, getting to know them, taking them in, really trying to capture and appreciate their individual differences. During testing, that's what I'm doing, really enjoying the process of discovery, working with kids almost as a detective to figure out the best things about their brains and how they work and how they learn and think and organize information. Probably the least favorite is all the documentation that follows after that assessment process. But I've also always taken pride and felt it's really important in doing assessment to be a practitioner, to also be a clinician, to treat, to intervene, to... understand what it takes to help a student arrive from point A to point B and construct interventions and strategies that work particularly for them.
So I always carry my own therapy caseload. I'm out in the community. I'll do school observations, home observations, work to coach parents. bring in family systems and conduct family sessions. So when I am writing recommendations in my reports, they're really applicable to real life, not just sitting in a testing bubble and spewing out some numbers.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What should parents consider when choosing a neuropsychologist for their child?
0:00–3:15
2
How can parents effectively vet and interview potential evaluators?
3:15–8:18
3
What’s the difference between a neuropsychological, psycho‑educational, and psychological assessment?
8:18–13:48
4
How does Dr. Nazar‑Biesman adapt the assessment process to a child’s needs on the day of testing?
13:48–19:10
5
What steps can parents take if they suspect their child received an inaccurate diagnosis?
19:10–23:23
6
How has COVID‑19 changed the way neuropsych evaluations are conducted?
23:23–28:18
7
What’s the best way for parents to use the detailed feedback and recommendations from a neuropsych report?
28:18–33:28
8
How should schools be involved with the neuropsych evaluation results and recommendations?
33:28–41:37
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from Full-Tilt Parenting: Strategies, Insights, and Connection for Parents Raising Neurodivergent Children
TPP 266a: A Conversation with Poet and Advocate LeDerick Horne
TPP 522: A Whole Child Approach to ADHD with Phil Boucher, M.D.
TPP 091a: A Conversation With Steve Silberman About His Book “Neurotribes”
TPP 521: A Conversation with Dr. Peter Gray About Restoring Childhood
TPP 253a: Advocate and Author Jonathan Mooney on Why Normal Sucks
TPP 520: Dr. Özgür Bolat on Why Rewards Backfire and the Real Science of Motivating Kids