Neuropsychology In An Upheaval

Since 2014 Neuropsychologists in the United States have been engaged in a bitter battle over the proper way to address the part of their test batteries which try to determine if the patient is giving full effort or is faking it. (“malingering”) Effort testing is often used by the defense in particularly mild TBI cases. However, while more and more “effort tests” are piled into the test, the chances of being mistakenly identified as a malingerer, who fails one or more of these tests, is much higher. However, the false-positive rate of most of these tests (percentage of people who are mistakenly diagnosed as being malingerers) if the false-positive rate was 30%, would mean that three out of ten people.  We are working to clean this up.