Dr. Ludlam has her Master’s degree in Early Childhood Risk and Prevention from Harvard University and a Ph.D. from Alliant International University in Clinical Psychology. Her research and clinical interests have centered around the topic of trauma and trauma-related disorders.

We also spend some time talking about parental evaluations. She is primarily responsible for doing evaluations both for diagnostic purposes and for court cases.

We talk through what often leads up to the court order for psychological evaluations. They can be very beneficial for the court and often therapeutic for the person being evaluated.

There are a couple of types of evaluations. One is where every party, husband, wife, new boyfriend, new girlfriend, and kids are processed. Those are often long and can be expensive.

They also do parental capacity evaluations. Although there is no test for what makes someone a good parent so they look at multiple things like personality traits, are there disorders, do collateral interviews with people who could observe the person parenting, look at health records, mental health records. They are multi-modal and multi-source. It's only after weighing all the elements that they can make recommendations.

Cases are often not clear-cut in favor of single custody. The goal is two healthy parents and giving them the tools to get there.

The first step is an interview. Your side of the story. Start to finish. Then we do psychological testing.

Judges really depend on the expertise of the evaluators because they have no dog in the fight as a non-biased third-party source.

There are some cases where children in a divorce case are interviewed. We talk about parental alienation. What is it? Why is it brought up so much in divorce cases? It's pretty complex. It's not just one thing. It involves things like communication, how they talk about the other parent, are they sharing information, are they restricting access. Many parents don't realize they are doing even doing it.

You can find out more about Dr. Ludlam and her firm KKJ Forensic & Psychological Services on their website.