Diagnostic Assessments
Clarity before treatment.
Clear diagnostic understanding is the foundation of effective treatment. We offer three assessment pathways, tailored to the complexity of your presentation and your clinical needs.
Basic Diagnostic Evaluation
For individuals beginning therapy who seek diagnostic clarity about their primary concerns.
Individuals with straightforward presentations, anxiety or depression, adjustment difficulties following life changes, grief, trauma responses, burnout, or concerns related to medical illness, who benefit from diagnosis clarification and structured treatment planning.
Comprehensive Diagnostic Evaluation
For individuals with complex presentations requiring deeper diagnostic assessment and personality profile clarification.
Individuals who have received multiple or conflicting diagnoses, whose symptoms span several domains, or whose presentation does not fit neatly into a single diagnostic category. The Comprehensive Evaluation provides clarity on complex differential diagnoses and detailed personality profile information to guide treatment.
"I've been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, ADHD, PTSD, and borderline personality disorder by different clinicians, and nobody seems sure what's actually going on."
Comprehensive ADHD Evaluation
For individuals seeking comprehensive ADHD and cognitive evaluation.
Individuals seeking thorough ADHD evaluation with cognitive testing to clarify the presence, profile, and impact of attention, executive functioning, and cognitive processing. This evaluation identifies strengths and specific areas of challenge, and provides concrete recommendations for treatment, educational accommodations, or workplace supports.
Comprehensive ADHD Evaluation
Ages 16 and upMore than a yes-or-no answer.
Anxiety, depression, trauma, sleep disruption and mood cycling can all look like ADHD, and often occur alongside it. Our evaluation is built around differential diagnosis, so treatment addresses what is actually driving your difficulties.
Full details on the ADHD evaluation →Schedule your assessment (phone consultation to confirm which option is appropriate for your needs).
Complete your evaluation. Bring any relevant records or medical information.
Receive your results. For the Basic Evaluation, findings and treatment planning are integrated into your first therapy session. For the Comprehensive and ADHD evaluations, you'll receive a detailed results consultation.
Begin treatment. Whether you continue therapy with us or pursue other supports, you'll have clear direction and actionable recommendations.
If you begin with a Basic Diagnostic Evaluation and we identify substantial diagnostic complexity during that assessment, we can recommend transitioning to a Comprehensive Diagnostic Evaluation. Your Basic Evaluation fee applies fully toward the Comprehensive evaluation cost.
All assessments are conducted by Dr. Soffia Elisabet Palsdottir, Psy.D., and include a comprehensive written diagnostic summary and treatment recommendations.
Psychotherapy
Depth-oriented, relationally grounded.
Therapy at Saga is formulation-driven. Your treatment is shaped by a specific, evolving understanding of who you are, what patterns have developed over time, and what is maintaining your distress, not by a manualized protocol applied to a diagnostic label. Our approach draws primarily on psychodynamic and relational theory, integrating mindfulness-based, cognitive-behavioral, and existential modalities as the clinical picture warrants, with a strong emphasis on the mind-body connection and the impact of lifestyle factors on psychological well-being.
Progress you can see, not just feel.
Brief, periodic measures throughout treatment help us track what's working together, a way of checking our bearings alongside the deeper relational work, so that both of us can see the path forward clearly.
Psychological impact of serious medical illness
Flagship specialtySerious illness does not only threaten the body. It interrupts identity, upends roles inside a family, and asks people to make consequential decisions while frightened and exhausted. Much of that goes unspoken in medical settings, where the appointment is short and the focus is necessarily on the disease.
This is the work our founder trained in at the bedside, and it remains the practice's deepest area of expertise. We understand treatment protocols and their psychological costs, we can hold conversations about mortality without deflecting, and we recognize that distress after treatment ends is not a relapse but a predictable part of the arc.
More on psycho-oncology →Women's mental health
Perinatal mood and anxiety, perimenopause-related mood changes, reproductive loss, and the hormonal-psychological interplay that shapes them.
High-functioning professionals
A specialty area. For executives, physicians, founders, attorneys, and other high-achieving professionals whose competence masks how depleted they've become. We work with burnout that doesn't resolve with rest, moral injury from workplaces that reward compromise, the exhausting effort of holding a role together for others, and the gap between an outwardly capable identity and an inward sense of imposture or emptiness. Because these patterns rarely show up as obvious distress, treatment starts with taking seriously what the person themselves may be inclined to minimize.
Complex grief and existential distress
A specialty area. Grief that doesn't move in a predictable arc, ambiguous loss, disenfranchised loss, grief tangled with relief or guilt, or loss that surfaces years later at a life transition. We also work with existential distress that isn't grief at all: disorientation after a life-altering event, a crisis of meaning or purpose, or the quiet unraveling that can follow when a life built around achievement or caretaking no longer feels sufficient.
Trauma and relational patterns
Acute trauma following a single overwhelming event, and complex trauma built from prolonged or repeated experiences, including childhood adversity, attachment disruption, and the ways early relational experiences shape adult functioning.
First responders
Police, fire, EMS, and dispatch personnel facing the cumulative weight of repeated exposure to traumatic events, alongside the sustained stress, shift demands, and cultural pressures particular to the work.
Sessions are typically 60 minutes, with 80-minute sessions available. Frequency is determined collaboratively.
Couples Therapy
A depth-oriented approach to couples work, grounded in the same formulation-driven philosophy as our individual therapy. Rather than focusing only on surface conflicts or communication scripts, we work to understand the maladaptive relational patterns each partner brings into the relationship, how early attachment experiences continue to shape expectations, reactivity, and repair, and what unmet needs are driving the cycles that keep resurfacing. The goal is not a quick fix to the presenting argument, but a clearer, shared understanding of the relationship's underlying dynamics, one both partners can use long after treatment ends.
A small caseload means your therapist has the time to know your history in depth, adjust the approach as your formulation evolves, and stay in close conversation with any other clinician supporting your care.
One practice, one team, one formulation.
Whether a patient is engaged in therapy alone or undergoing a comprehensive evaluation, the clinical team is working from a shared formulation. Your therapist and your evaluator are not operating in parallel, they are in conversation, guided by the same understanding of who you are and what you need.
This is what we mean by craft. Not more services, but more coherent care.
This is the practical payoff of Saga's structure: no re-explaining your history to a new provider, no conflicting recommendations, just one team working from one understanding of you.
Not sure which service fits?
That's exactly what the first conversation is for. We'll help you understand which path makes sense before anything begins.
Request a Consultation