Child and Youth Mental Health

• Counselling by registered therapists spanning Ontario, including our agency’s therapists
• Immediate access to free therapy; no prior booking or appointment required
• Focuses on addressing one issue at a time and provides the freedom to access the service as many times as needed
• OST/PM is not anonymous – the program requires children and youth to provide information about themselves, including their name, date of birth, and postal code, to receive service
• Start with a conversation, leave with a plan. No matter why you connect, children and youth co-create a personalized plan with their therapist, which is shared with them
• Navigation services are available if additional assistance beyond the session is needed. OST/PM directly refers clients to additional services as close to them as possible in the child and youth mental health sector
• OST/PM has dedicated Francophone therapists and interpretation services to over 200+ languages, including ASL

• Children and youth (ages 0-17 years) located in Ontario
• Parents and caregivers located in Ontario are recommended to access the service with their child(ren)

• Monday to Friday, 12:00 PM to 8:00 PM EST
• Saturday 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM EST

Entry to the service closes 45 minutes before posted closure time to allow all clients to be served by end of service

• No issue is too big or small. If it’s important to you, it’s important to us.
• To connect with a therapist, visit onestoptalk.ca or call us at 1 855 416 8255.

This program provides quick help, lasting from 48 hours to 4 weeks, to help you feel stable and safe.

Goals of Short Stay Stabilization:

• Help you and your family deal with tough times, making sure you have problem-solving and coping skills in place.
• Teach you how to handle your emotions, thoughts, and actions during a crisis, and show the people who support you ways to help you recognize early warning signs.
• Find ways to reduce the things that trigger the crisis and learn how to prevent it.
• Work with community services to apply what you’ve learned back home. It’s common for challenges to continue after the Short Stay Stabilization program, and this is a pause to give you and your family a chance to breathe and regroup.
• Most importantly, create a safe space where we can all work together to get better.

Our Live-In Intensive Treatment is a 6-month live-in program. It is based on a Dialectical Behavioural Treatment (DBT) model, which is a therapy geared to help you learn new skills to gain better control over your thoughts, mood, and behaviour.

Goals of Live-In Treatment:

• Feel and handle emotions: We learn to understand our feelings and deal with them in a helpful way.
• Get along with others: We practice talking and getting along better with friends and family.
• Be mindful: We learn to focus on what’s happening now and understand our thoughts and feelings without being hard on ourselves.
• Deal with tough times: We find ways to stay calm when things get difficult.
• Control our emotions: We learn how to manage our feelings, so they don’t take over.
• Solve problems: We figure out how to fix problems and find good solutions.
• Believe in ourselves: We work on feeling good about who we are and accepting ourselves.
• Be safe: We stop doing things that might hurt us and choose better ways to cope.