Back To Home Page.

Types of Services

Psychological Assessments

In most cases, we begin by providing a psychological assessment. Good psychological assessments are an important first step in understanding what treatments will be most effective to address your concerns. Psychological assessments are provided across the age range from pre-K to late adulthood and involve assessment of mood, anxiety and behavioural disorders along with academic, social, family and health history. Assessments utilize a combination of clinical interviews and standardized behavioural questionnaires to better understand an individual’s background, history and development of the issue they want to work on. A brief mental health check up will also be provided. After your therapist has a good understanding of your background and presenting issue(s), they will provide feedback on assessment findings and make specific recommendations for treatment. They will discuss with you whether they feel they are a good fit to provide treatment. If they do not think they are a good fit for your needs, they will provide recommended resources for you to contact.


Assessments are typically 90-120 minutes in length. In some situations, your therapist may require an additional session to complete the assessment. For children and teenagers, your therapist will meet with both the child and their parents as part of the assessment.

Individual Treatment

In consultation with the client, your therapist will select the best therapy modality to address your concerns. In many cases, therapists draw from several different therapy modalities to provide treatment. Treatment is collaborative so that you and your therapist will continuously review the treatment plan in order to work together and decide the next steps in treatment.

 

Treatments for children often involve parents given the important role that parents play in supporting children in changing behaviour.

 

Number and Length of Sessions: Your therapist will discuss the number of recommended sessions with you. Some treatments are short term ( 6-8 sessions following assessment) while others are longer term (8 – 20 sessions). Treatment usually begins 1 x weekly for 50 min sessions and then may be lengthened to 1 x every 2 weeks, depending on client needs.

Therapy Approaches:

CBT is widely recognized as the gold standard treatment for a wide number of challenges with mood, anxiety and behavioural challenges. CBT involves helping clients identify unhelpful thoughts that trigger distressing emotions and lead to unwanted behaviours. Clients are provided with strategies to change their unhelpful thoughts which typically results in reduced distress and positive behaviour change. CBT approaches have been adapted for use across the lifespan from early childhood to older adulthood.
ACT is a newer form of CBT that has been shown in numerous scientific studies to improve psychological wellbeing. ACT helps us improve our ‘psychological flexibility.’ In other words, this mode of therapy helps us learn to be more flexible in how we respond to difficult emotions, thoughts or situations. ACT incorporates mindfulness skills to help train ourselves to better stay in the ‘‘here and now’ versus being overtaken by powerful emotions and urges that often leads us to behave in unwanted ways. ACT has shown good success in improving psychological wellbeing for a variety of situations including parenting challenges, mood and anxiety, addiction, and adjustment to health issues/illness.
Exposure therapies help individuals begin to gradually face feared or stressful situations that they have been avoiding. Examples of typical feared or stressful situations include public speaking, avoidance of social situations (e.g., speaking in front of others or being the center of attention), treatment of specific phobias such as fear of animals or flying, fears of eating specific foods or consequences of eating specific foods along with other specific feared situations. Exposure therapy is used for many forms of anxiety along with OCD. Treatment involves closely working with your therapist to learn skills so clients are gradually able to overcome their fear.
Mindfulness involves paying attention to the present moment, on purpose. Recognizing that some of us can be very hard on ourselves, mindfulness also focuses on helping people respond with more compassion and kindness to themselves and others. Mindfulness meditation has been evaluated in many studies for treatment of mood, anxiety, attention issues, grief, coping with health issues and parenting distress and has shown good evidence for improvement in psychological wellbeing. Mindfulness is a practice – your therapist will introduce you to mindfulness skills and practices in session. As with any skill, the benefits of mindfulness meditation come from practicing the skills as much as possible during your day and week.

Individual therapy is provided using approaches that have the best evidence to improve psychological wellbeing. Our therapists have a range of expertise across the following specialty areas:

  • Mood Issues
  • Anxiety including social anxiety, generalized worry, phobias, separation anxiety, panic, OCD and post traumatic stress
  • Anger management
  • Conflict Resolution
  • Addiction
  • Adjustment to Health
  • Conditions
  • Chronic Pain
  • Disordered Eating
  • Life Stress
  • ADHD
  • Behavioural challenges
  • Procrastination
  • Grief
  • Adjustment to life circumstances
  • Selective Mutism (excessive shyness)
  • Trichotolomania (hair pulling)
  • Rumination Disorder

Parent coaching involves teaching parents specific strategies to respond to challenging behaviour their child exhibits. Typical examples of situations that can benefit from parent training include:

  • Child has difficulty going to bed on time
  • Child displays oppositional or defiant behaviours (disrespect towards parent, siblings or other adults, not listening, being aggressive)
  • Child has difficulty initiating or focusing on tasks
  • Child has difficulty stopping a pleasurable activity (e.g., playing videogames, watching tablet)
  • Child has difficulty separating from a parent and being independent
  • Child constantly requires reassurance and support from parent(s)

Parents are provided with education to understand why their child may be behaving this way. Parents are provided with skills to understand best practices for implementing parental responses for specific behaviours. Individual behaviour plans will be developed for each situation and parents will be taught skills to address their specific challenge with their child. Therapists work closely with parents and the child to implement the behaviour plan and may also work with the school/teacher and other contexts where child spends time (e.g., daycare), so important people in the child’s life can all be consistent in how they respond to child behaviours.

Fees

Before setting up an appointment, you will be informed of our fees. The fees vary according to the training of our clinicians, and the treatment modality (e.g. individual, family, couple, group, consultation). In most cases, our fees are fully or partially covered by most insurance plans, and in many cases, are tax-deductible. Payment should be made within 24 hours of your session. We accept cash, cheques and Interac e-transfers.