The psychological evaluations are structured so they will catch (in most cases) those with unstable emotional/ mental health. The way they answer some key questions will most often give indications of a disorder, for instance.
Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/10/2015 06:15PM by SusieQ#1.
As far as the latter question, mental health issues alone will not get you dishonorably discharged. You may get medically discharged. It depends on circumstance, but unless you commit a violation of the UCMJ that can be punished by dishonorable discharge, a mental illness won't matter. Note that there are varying levels of discharge; for many purposes, a dishonorable discharge is equivalent to having committed a felony punishable by at least a year's imprisonment (ie, the Lautenberg Amendment).
On the LEO side, every department gets to set its own standard. Some require a polygraph. Some will sit you for an MMPI or equivalent. Some will require you meet with a psychiatrist and perform an assessment. So when you say "Fail a psych eval," you could be meaning a number of different things.
For departments that mandate an MMPI, there are two pretty bright lines you can't cross. The first is the "Lie" scale, which indicates the honesty of your answers by using previously correlated results. To give an example, let's say I know by previous sampling that most people whose favorite color is red also enjoy romantic comedies. If somebody indicates that her favorite color is red but enjoys dramas, I know she's likely lying. The "Lie" scale uses independent answers to determine the probability the candidate is lying. The other scale is "Psychopathic Deviate," which they use to weed out people that want to become an LEO in order to straighten society out.
Psychiatrists have their own mechanisms and evaluations, and it's rare for a typical municipal LE organization to mandate a psychiatric eval outside of a few blue-state municipalities. This is totally case-by-case.
On the poly, some departments will use an in-house expert, others will farm it out to a third party. Fail criteria for the poly are relatively straightforward -- a deviation of whatever indicators they are using (EGR, typically, though there may be others including heartbeat, respiration, nerve conduction, and others) sufficient to clear whatever bar is set. Polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and the people that run them can affect the results. Polygraphs are usually meant more to intimidate people into telling the truth than actually detect a lie. Some people have high social anxiety and as a result fail polygraphs.
I'd wager your friend probably failed an MMPI on one of the scales the department requires. You could ask him, and he's entitled to FOIA it under most departmental guidelines.
I found the MMPI earlier today during my google searching. I wonder if other employers use parts of it to determine who's a good match for a company? When I applied for a big box retailer 5 years ago, I had to take a personality assessment with statements like "I never lose my temper" and "I frequently feel tired" with multiple choice answers like Always, Sometimes, Rarely, Never. Is the MMPI like that?
It's kind of a bizarre, complicated situation I'm placed in right now and I'm trying to understand it on many levels. When things settle down and/or change, I may elaborate more.
The full MMPI when I last took it was 500+ questions long. They have a pool of questions they draw from; I think the bank is something like over 1000+ correlated questions, and they usually toss a few more in there in order to create new correlations and thereby keep the bank up-to-date.
MMPI questions are true/false. There are some efforts underway to incorporate a hesitancy measure (ie, the shorter or longer you spend per question may indicate either a pre-canned response or dilemma, which can impact the scales), but I haven't heard of anything being incorporated yet.
Some employers will administer personality tests, but generally not the MMPI. There is a big branch of psychology concerned with 'ergonomic' or 'business' psychology. Personnel will evaluate your existing workforce, and correlate the most productive members (or member cohorts) to questions. Then, when you look to hire new people, they'll look to see who most closely matches the personality types required.
The MMPI will usually require a trained psychologist to read, and there's no pass/fail. Some scales will be okay in some professions (ie, high on 'Obsession' for somebody in quality assurance) and not okay in others (a transactional manager, for example).
In any case, MMPI scores can be used as a single criteria for the DSM when evaluating for mental illness, but I don't know of any diagnoses off hand that can be made on the basis of MMPI results alone. Usually a psychologist or psychiatrist will need to see if the rest of the criteria are met.
I also took the full MMPI when I was applying to work at a security company. It was 500 questions. There are some really interesting questions on that one. Here are a few I remember:
Do you hear voices in your head? Are you afraid of sex? Are you afraid of dirt?
I really puzzled over it for a while afterwards. I mean, if someone is really hearing voices in their head, are they going to admit that on a multiple choice test? I don't know. I guess it works or they wouldn't use it.
Dishonorable discharges are usually the result of conduct against the UCMJ, regardless of whether or not they are brought up on formal charges. As far as police psych tests, there are usually two parts. The first is a test with a series of multiple choice questions that are centered on your thinking process and emotional reactions. When I took it I swear there were a thousand. You then have an interview with the psychologist. You are never told the metrics by which you are measured, but somehow I passed.
I have seen some people who I thought would make good officers flunk the psych test. That just goes to show you never really know someone. I never read that much into it however.
Makes me think of a long ago acquaintance who failed the psych eval when trying to become a fire fighter. I REALLY want to know why he failed, but he always insisted they didn't tell him. He would never have been my first pick as a capable person who would respond well under pressure... and since he was my boss in a pizza joint for a while, I got to see him in action under the most routine, predictable kind of pressure, not anywhere close to saving lives in an emergency kind of pressure.
Now I'm going to be googling! Sorry, not much help...
I doubt it applies in this situation, but it's something to take into consideration.
WinksWinks, actually a really life situation like yours is quite helpful. Some people can't handle pressure in any venue and lose their cool at fairly insignificant problems.
Google "Passing police psychology test" or exam. There's lots out there, including coaching services that will, for a fee, prep you for the specific department or exam a candidate will face.
Among other things, psych test examiners are looking for consistency, or lack thereof, in answers. These tests can be long (taking several hours to complete) and therefore the same question can be asked several different times in several different ways.
Edited 3 time(s). Last edit at 02/11/2015 01:55AM by steve benson.
One thing a coach told me about a test with "1-to-5" answers, where you have "none of the time," "Some of the time," up to "all of the time." If the question involves a bad habit or a character problem, such as "I feel like telling people just what I think of them" your answer has to be an ABSOLUTE denial of the problem trait or an ABSOLUTE affirmation of the positive behavior or feeling.
To my hypothetical question above, the answer is "None of the time."
To a question/statement about a positive trait, e.g. "I try to be polite," the answer is "All of the time," not even "most of the time."
I was involved in a critical incident once, and the jerks higher up decided to put me through testing. I consulted with a coach, and applied that advice, and passed. (Nice to know they had such faith in me, the assholes.)
But as I stated above, a good coaching service is knowledgeable on various jurisdictions' evaluation criteria, and what tests are out there. But expect to pay.
A testing coach told me about a test with "1-to-5" answers, where you have "none of the time," "Some of the time," up to "all of the time." If the question involves a bad habit or a character problem, such as "I feel like telling people just what I think of them" your answer has to be an ABSOLUTE denial of the problem trait or an ABSOLUTE affirmation of the positive behavior or feeling.
To my hypothetical question above, the answer is "None of the time."
To a question/statement about a positive trait, e.g. "I try to be polite," the answer is "All of the time," not even "most of the time."
I was involved in a critical incident once, and the jerks higher up decided to put me through testing. I consulted with a coach, and applied that advice, and passed. (Nice to know they had such faith in me, the assholes.)
But as I stated above, a good coaching service is knowledgeable on various jurisdictions' evaluation criteria, and what tests are out there. But expect to pay.
Military and law enforcement are (supposed to be) two completely different things. If the military kills the wrong people, it's just an "oops" that gets covered up. If a cop kills the wrong people, the city pays a bunch of money. Having a mentally unstable person on the force can be very expensive. Psych evals are about risk management.
On the other hand, the military needs a certain kind of crazy. Maybe not all kinds of crazy.
Ex-military (British) so that's what I'm going to answer. I have no ideas about the rozzers.
A dishonourable discharge is not good. It's really bad. For example, I was not exactly a model soldier and got a couple of charges for insubordination and even got demoted a rank......but I still finished my tour of service, got the gongs for valour and distinguished conduct on my chest, an honourable discharge and a salute from Her Majesty.
To get a dishonourable discharge, you would have had to commit a very serious offence.....usually something bad enough to land a custodial sentence, such as desertion, sexual assault, murder, espionage etc etc. It would only take place after a full court martial and is generally reserved for the most reprehensible and offensive conduct amongst soldiers.
I'm with Aussieblokesarebest, only as it relates to US service. Getting a dishonourable discharge in the US military takes commission of something very serious, not just a bad psychological evaluation. At worst, a bad psych evaluation would result in a medical discharge, the same as if you had developed some illness that the military is not equipped to handle.
Psychological evaluations are reactive in the military, except at the most elementary level. You do something bizarre, and they may refer you to a psychologist who administers a series of tests. We recently had a soldier who had a breakdown. After a week or two of hospitalization in the psych ward and appropriate testing, he was given a medical discharge. He was gifted, possibly a genius, and we have all felt diminished by his absence. (He has posted here, I believe.)
Although military and law enforcement are not the same, the police often use military standards and may be a little bit more proactive in psychological evaluations. I just don't know. Many American police departments seem to have a large number of unprofessional officers with personality disorders, so they may even tolerate more problems than the military.
I served as a legal clerk in the US Army. What many people don't realize is that when it comes to characterization of service there are a number of gradations in discharge types between honorable and dishonorable. Wikipedia has a detailed description of them all, but in a nutshell:
Entry Level Separation (ELS), for people who are discharged within six months. General, for people who are discharged for a variety of reasons, including misconduct. Other Than Honorable (OTH), usually for misconduct. Bad Conduct Discharge (BCD), obviously for misconduct.
The vast majority of people discharged for psychological reasons receive an honorable discharge (unless there are complicating factors, like serious misconduct). A Dishonorable Discharge can only be given as the result of a court martial, and is very serious.
Ok, so, in spite of the above, the vast majority of people have no idea what these really mean, and most soldiers assume that being discharged or separated from the service for any reason is a "dishonorable discharge," and will describe their departure as such when all they really mean is "I didn't complete my term of service." In many cases, soldiers who technically receive an honorable discharge will believe they've been dishonorably discharged because they're applying a "common sense" sort of definition rather than the actual characterization of their service. Also, for some it's a bragging right to claim they were dishonorably discharged (when, in fact, they may not have been).
Anyway, all that to say: just because someone says, or thinks, that they were dishonorably discharged, it's not necessarily true (and probably isn't). To the OP's discussion above, Dishonoranle Discharges are never given for psychological reasons, only for very serious misconduct.
You are right. But a person actually discharged on either a BCD or a dishonourable discharge will really know it. And I'm not sure whether my friend and co-worker got medically or honourably discharged. For reasons of confidentiality, none of us know.
...Major Nidal Hassan wasn't only admitted into the military, he became a major and was a psychiatrist. One wonder how HE did on the military psych exam.