Many families come to the Monarch Diagnostic Clinic with evaluations that have been performed by clinicians in local communities and schools. Often these reports reveal the clinician’s thinking process in determining whether a child may meet criteria for a given diagnosis, e.g., Asperger’s Disorder, which can be very helpful to our clinicians in developing an initial set of hypotheses about the child. Diagnostic information is also generally quite useful in qualifying children for services and for starting to think about what kind(s) of treatment a given child may need. In some cases, however, families sought the evaluation mainly because they were unsure of a proper course of action that would be in the best interest of their child. In other words, many families are far more interested in a workable treatment plan than in a diagnosis. In many cases, the reports we receive do not contain much in the way of a treatment plan. While the desire to understand the child’s challenges is always present, the real questions for most families center around “What are we going to DO about my child’s challenges?”

With its grounding in the innovative and therapeutic setting of The Monarch School, our Clinic has unique access to many sources of treatment-related knowledge and practices. Our clinicians are treatment providers who are actively involved in cutting edge service delivery using an integrated model, such that recommendations made for a child are grounded in experience with matching client needs to various available supports. To help further de-mystify the treatment process, our clinicians spell out in detail how a given child’s specific challenges can be addressed with various forms of structure and intervention. In this way, we work to explain what areas of weakness are being targeted by a recommended support system, and we strive to promote parent understanding of how that system addresses these areas. It is our intent to produce a resultant treatment plan that is both comprehensive in its review of indicated supports and comprehensible from the point of view of families. In our view, this is the recipe for a strong treatment plan – one that will have truly meaningful impact on the life of a child, and one that provides an easy-to-follow road map for supporting families and providers.