Mental Health Treatment

Mental health challenges are often associated with a variety of skill deficits that cause impairment for youth. As a result, a major focal point of our mental health supports is to explicitly teach mental health skills. We take a non-pathologizing approach and strive to understand the underlying skill deficits that are contributing to our clients’ challenges. Through the use of empirically supported and developmentally sound approaches, we help youth enhance their skillsets in the areas of self-regulation, emotion recognition, emotion regulation, problem-solving, anger management, flexibility, executive functioning, tolerance building, perspective taking, accurate thinking, effective communication, prosocial interactions, empathy, and much more.

Youth who experience mental health challenges may engage in a variety of maladaptive behaviours (e.g., aggression, antisocial conduct, avoidance, escape, self-harm, lying, risk-taking, etc.). At PMHC, we understand that these behaviours are often very effective at helping youth access desired outcomes (e.g., using aggression to solve conflict with peers, using avoidance tactics to circumvent facing fears, etc.). All behaviours serve a function and at PMHC we strive to understand the function of maladaptive behaviours so that we can help teach youth more adaptive ways to access desired outcomes.

At PMHC, we understand that effective mental health care is more than just the time that a child or teen spends in therapy. Growth achieved within therapy must generalize to the environments where youth experience hardships (e.g., within the home, school, and/or community setting). As a result, we strive to work collaboratively with relevant stakeholders (e.g., caregivers, teachers, etc.), to help them understand the skills, tools, and strategies that a youth is working on and how they can support the youth in incorporating more adaptive psycho-social approaches in their life. This type of collaboration only takes place with the explicit awareness and consent of the person that we are working with as we value the importance of privacy and confidentiality.

To best support youth, our team is well versed in using a variety of therapeutic modalities that have been shown to be effective for enhancing mental wellness among the paediatric population including Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Solution- Focused Therapy, Motivational Interviewing, Functional Behavioural Analysis, Behaviour Modification, and Structured Play Therapy.

Over the years, our team has developed competencies in supporting youth with a variety of difficulties including: