One of the earliest professional tasks mental health service providers are taught in their postgraduate education involves assessment. To take but one example, under the eligibility criteria for doctoral training programs established by the Committee on Accreditation from the American Psychological Association states the following requirement:

Diagnosing or defining problems through psychological assessment and measurement and formulating and implementing intervention strategies (including training in empirically supported procedures). To achieve this end, the students shall be exposed to at least the following areas: theories and methods of assessment and diagnosis; effective intervention; consultation and supervision; and evaluating the efficacy of interventions (p. 7; Guidelines and Principles; APA Office of Program Consultation and Accreditation, 2012).

The prominence of assessment in this statement suggests the centrality of this activity. Interestingly, while assessment is stressed in postgraduate education, many clinicians consider their primary evaluation tactic to be the clinical interview. Indeed, one recent survey showed that structured interviews are routinely conducted by fewer than 15% of providers (Bruchmüller, Margraf, Suppiger, & Schneider, 2011) suggesting that most practitioners are ignoring a significant portion of their professional training when they enter the workforce. While many professionals fail to continue to rely on select aspects of their postgraduate training, this is a glaring inadequacy not only because of its centrality in graduate coursework but also because of well-established principles showing actuarial prediction of outcomes being superior to clinical judgment (Dawes, Faust, & Meehl, 1989).

To be fair, many clinicians use other assessment instruments to inform practice aside from structured interviews. These measures provide a means for determining specific targets for therapy as well as markers for charting improvement. With the advent of wider acceptance of empirically supported practices (Chambless & Ollendick, 2001), the specific instruments associated with efficacious treatment have become widely known as well. These measures often have the benefit of sound psychometric qualities, and in some instances provide specific cutoffs established using sophisticated methodologies such as receiver operating characteristic curves (ROC curves; Nunnally & Bernstein, 1994) or taxometric analyses (Waller & Meehl, 1998).

And, in the name of additional fairness, assessment procedures that are time consuming are frequently eschewed for simple economic reasons. Specifically, many insurance companies are reluctant to cover this aspect of practice or provide coverage that is well below that associated with other professional services. This confounding scenario is one important future policy direction that deserves attention. It is tantamount to seeking medical care for high blood pressure and the only assessment being the doctor inquiring as to whether one feels like their pressure is high.