The evaluation with an adult consists of one 45 min meeting where your history and current issues are obtained. At the end of the meeting, Dr. Martin will summarize his findings and suggest treatment obtains. With children and young adolescents, the evaluation often entails two or more sessions. The first session is usually with the young person and parent(s). The second /third session is just with the youngster and it is confidential (except for life threatening information). At the end of the evaluation, Dr. Martin will share his thoughts and recommendations with the child/young teenager and parent(s). With an older teenager, Dr. Martin often speaks with the teenager alone first and then with the parents.
At times, if the patient is a child, Dr. Martin will want to speak with a teacher or others involved.
Also, Dr. Martin may request further medical or psychological testing.
Dr. Martin provides two basic types of treatments: psychological and pharmacologic
Psychological:
This goes by many words such as counseling, psychotherapy, psychodynamic psychotherapy, insight-oriented psychotherapy, psychoanalytic psychotherapy, etc. It all is about helping the patient learn about themselves and their history and to learn new ways to cope/adapt to make life happier and more fulfilling.
Pharmacologic:
In the past 20 years, the brain and it’s physiology has become a major and worldwide focus helping those with major and minor psychiatric disorders. The mind and the body are the same. Thoughts, feelings and behaviors all stem from brain functions working well or not. To that end, Dr. Martin utilizes a range of FDA approved medications for depression, anxiety disorders including panic attacks and obsessive-compulsive disorder, ADD, bipolar disorder, psychoses and others. Some medications are not FDA approved but commonly used by physicians.
Dr. Martin attempts at all times to blend the two modalities above to achieve maximum wellness for the individual.