From waiting room to mother's lap: parameters in testing a psychotic, school-phobic child.

In this article, I discuss the challenging experience of testing a child with severe separation anxiety and school refusal, which reached psychotic-level proportions. Unusual parameters are necessary to provide assessments with severely compromised children. In cases such as these, the goal should be to gather as much useful information as possible, paying particular attention to the conditions, which allow testing to take place. Such information will afford clues to the necessary conditions for providing required therapeutic and educational support.