A psychiatric evaluation is a thorough assessment conducted by a licensed psychiatrist to understand your mental health status. This evaluation explores your emotional well-being, past mental health history, and any symptoms of anxiety, depression, or other psychiatric conditions.
Mental health and substance use are often closely linked. By identifying any co-occurring mental health disorders, we can create a more comprehensive treatment plan that supports both your emotional and physical recovery. This approach ensures that you receive integrated care tailored to your mental health needs.
A psychiatric evaluation helps identify underlying mental health conditions that may impact your thoughts, emotions, and behavior. By diagnosing issues like anxiety, depression, or mood disorders, it allows for targeted treatment—whether through therapy, medication, or both—providing a clearer path toward emotional stability and long-term healing.
Psychiatric evaluation, explained
What a thorough psychiatric workup looks like and why it matters.
A psychiatric evaluation at RECO Immersive in Delray Beach is conducted by a board-certified psychiatrist and covers: detailed psychiatric and medical history, current symptoms and functioning, substance-use history, family psychiatric history, trauma history, prior psychiatric treatment and response, current medications and supplements, mental-status exam, and integration with bio-psycho-social findings, lab work, and qEEG when available. The evaluation is typically 60-90 minutes.
Many outpatient psychiatric appointments today are 15-20 minute medication checks. A comprehensive psychiatric evaluation — what we do at admission — takes the full hour-plus and integrates findings from across your care team. The psychiatrist also reviews qEEG brain mapping, pharmacogenomic results, comprehensive labs, and trauma history before recommending medication. The result is a far more individualized medication strategy than typical outpatient care can produce.
Sometimes, when the picture is clear and you're stable. More often, the first evaluation produces a working diagnosis and a recommended treatment direction, with medication decisions finalized after lab and qEEG results return. Some clients arrive on medications that need adjustment; we'll discuss any urgent changes immediately. Some clients are looking to taper off medications that aren't working; that's also addressed in the evaluation and managed safely over the following weeks.
Absolutely. Treatment at RECO Immersive is collaborative, not coercive. Some clients prefer therapy-only approaches, some prefer medication, and most use both. If you don't want medication, the psychiatrist works with you on the underlying conditions through other modalities — TMS, biofeedback, integrative medicine, intensive therapy, sleep optimization. The decision about whether and how to use medication is yours, made with full information about benefits, risks, and alternatives.
Treatment-resistant cases are something our psychiatric team specializes in. When typical first-line and second-line medications haven't worked, we look upstream — comprehensive labs to identify medical contributors, pharmacogenomic testing to identify metabolizer issues that explain past failures, qEEG to identify brain-state patterns that predict response to specific medications, trauma history that may have been missed. Most clients labeled 'treatment-resistant' improve substantially when those upstream factors get addressed.
