What is One Stop Talk/Parlons maintenant?
One Stop Talk/Parlons maintenant offers children, youth, and their families immediate access to free mental health supports when and how they need them. The program provides single-session counselling support and ensures direct referral to additional services when needed. Services are provided through an integrated network of infant, child and youth mental health agencies across Ontario.

You will receive:

• Counselling from experienced clinicians from across the province
• In the moment access to counselling, no appointment needed
• Access to One Stop Talk/Parlons maintenant after hours and on weekends
• A plan you to take with you after the session that you co-create
• Direct connection to services in your community within the same visit, as needed
• The opportunity to self-select service when it’s right for you

Who can contact One Stop Talk/Parlons maintenant?

• Children and Youth within 18 years of age
• Parents and caregivers of children and youth within 18 years of age

Help Ahead: Access for Infants, Children, Youth & Families

Help Ahead is a free referral phone service to help connect infants, children, youth up to 18 years old and their families to mental health and addiction services in their community. Our goal is to help those in need find and get mental health help as efficiently and quickly as possible.

Anyone under the age of 18 experiencing a mental health issue or anyone who wants to support someone under the age of 18 and wants access to mental health services can call.

If you are a young person, you might call if you:

• Feel anxious or worried
• Feel depressed, sad or angry
• Are being bullied
• Don’t feel yourself…
• Want more information about mental health and addiction services in your community.

If you are a parent/caregiver of an infant or child, you might call if:

• Your infant/child is crying inconsolably; having tantrums; irregular sleep or eating patterns;
• You are worried about your infant/child’s development; feeling overwhelmed and frustrated by parenting; or asking, “is this just a phase?”
• You want more information about mental health and addiction services in your community.

Service providers, doctors, teachers, school social workers, child protection services and any other support service can call Help Ahead too for more information, but we will need the expressed consent of the person or parent to refer to a service.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Link

The What’s Up Walk-In® Clinic is Toronto’s only free, six day a week mental health counselling walk-in service for children, youth, young adults, and families. The clinic helps with issues such as depression, anxiety, self-harm, suicidal ideation, sexual identity matters, bullying, behavioural concerns, addictions, and anything else that might be on one’s mind. All the information you provide is confidential.

Therapists offer single sessions up to an hour long. We don’t judge. We will support you in your concerns and work collaboratively with you. The focus is on abilities, resources, and skills that you have, or you want to develop. Together we will target a priority concern and develop a plan with you that you feel comfortable with. If you feel you need more help, you can come back to the What’s Up Walk-In. All our therapists are clinically trained.

The clinic is barrier free, and accessible. No health card or appointment is necessary and it’s completely free!  The What’s Up Walk-In network is a collection of 6 agencies operating at 8 sites across the City of Toronto.

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Link

Children, youth up to age 18, their mental health professional and families can access psychiatric consultation via virtual platform. Youth and family must be connected to a service provider to support the referral process.

This service requires a referral by a mental health professional who has worked with the child/youth and family and is knowledgeable of their situation. The mental health professional will be involved in the entire process following the psychiatric consultation and will follow up with the client on any recommendations.

All referral forms must be faxed to 416-926-1784. If you have any questions, please email the Urban Tele-Mental Health Service Coordinator at urbantelementalhealth@stridestoronto.ca or call us at 416-438-3697 ext. 21361.

The Triple P-Positive Parenting Program is a multi-level, preventively-oriented parenting and family support strategy developed by the authors and colleagues at The University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia. The program aims to prevent severe behavioural, emotional and developmental problems in children by enhancing the knowledge, skills and confidence of parents.

The program content draws on the following:

1. Social learning models of parent-child interaction that highlight the reciprocal and bidirectional nature of parent child interactions.
2. Research in child and family behaviour therapy and applied behaviour analysis.
3. Developmental research on parenting in everyday contexts
4. Social information processing models that highlight the important role of parental cognitions such as attributions, expectancies and beliefs.
5. Research from the field of developmental psychopathology that has identified specific risk and protective factors that are linked to adverse developmental outcomes in children.
6. A population health perspective to family intervention that involves the explicit recognition of the role of the broader ecological context for human development.

The group goals are:

1. To increase parents’ competence in managing common behavior problems and developmental issues
2. To reduce parents’ use of coercive and punitive methods of disciplining children
3. To reduce parenting stress associated with raising children

Triple P is offered over seven sessions:

1. Introduction, What is Positive Parenting, Causes of Child Behaviour Problems, Goals for change, Keeping track of children’s behaviours
2. Promoting children’s development, developing positive relationships with children, encouraging desirable behaviour, teaching new skills and behaviours
3. Managing misbehaviour, developing parenting routines
4. Planning ahead, family survival tips, high risk situations, planned activities routines
5. Telephone session – Implementing parenting routines
6. Telephone session – Implementing parenting routines continued
7. Program close – phasing out the program, progress review, maintenance of change, problem solving for the future, future goals, celebration

The Priority Access for Students (PAS) Program provides individual and family focused counselling services as well as case management for Toronto District School Board and Toronto Catholic District School Board students and their families.
Students who need support and help are identified and referred by their school social workers to this program. Counselling can be provided in home or in office and includes collaboration with the schools to support students and their families around their identified mental health needs.

The goal of PAS is to prepare youth to function independently and effectively within the school environment, the greater community and in the home. We also work to prevent youth from needing more intensive services like a Residential Treatment program in the future. Trained clinicians provide Individual and Family Therapy once a week or up to two times a week if needed. Sometimes workers will meet clients in their community, at their school, or in their home, but we encourage in-office sessions at flexible times during the day or evening.

We will also connect youth to community resources that might be difficult to access.

Our Intensive Child and Family Service is offered to children and their caregivers who are experiencing social, emotional, and/or behavioural challenges that interfere with their daily lives and may lead to family breakdown in either their home, school and/or community. Often families eligible for this service are living with complex needs that may be impacting multiple domains of their lives.

Services are provided in-home, in-community, in-office or other settings which would be most helpful to supporting change. These services are provided by a Child and Family Therapist who will meet as frequently as required to help make a difference, offering service in a flexible manner that may include individual treatment, family and/or group therapy.

Family Counselling is intended to help caregivers explore their concerns about their child with a trained therapist. The goals of counselling services are to help your family get an understanding of your concerns and to enhance problem solving skills; as well, to give your family an opportunity to learn effective ways to cope with any different challenges.

Benefits of Family Counselling may include:

• Receiving help to define family goals
• Finding ways of achieving the goals and improving communication in your relationships
• Learning new information about your child’s personality or development
• Connecting or coordinating services with other community groups and activities
• Communicating with your child’s school or day care
• Learning more effective or useful parenting strategies
• Receiving an assessment to help with treatment planning (e.g., psychological assessment)
• Experiencing a safe place to talk about painful events that have affected your child

Access to this group is through Intake.

Facing Your Fears is a group program that uses a cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT) approach for the reduction of anxiety symptoms (Facing Your Fears Facilitator’s Manual, 2011). There is a vast amount of literature supporting the use of CBT to manage children’s anxiety, resulting in CBT being the best practice for the management of this disorder.

The overall goal is to provide children with the skills for them to be able to successfully cope in a variety of anxiety-provoking situations.

The treatment goals are:

• Helping children to recognize signs of anxious arousal and to use these as cues for the use of anxiety management strategies
• Encourage children to identify negative self-statements in order to initiate more positive and constructive self-statements
• Helping children to use self-ratings and self-rewards
• Identifying the cognitive processes associated with excessive anxious arousal
• Training in cognitive strategies for anxiety management and behavioural relaxation
• Performance-based practice opportunities with learned skills applied to real-life situations
• Provide parents with the knowledge and skills needed to support their child in coping with anxiety

There are 14 sessions, which cover:

1. Welcome to Group: Words We Use for Worry
2. When I Worry
3. Time Spent Worrying
4. What Worry Does to My Body: Beginning to Measure Worry
5. The Mind-Body Connection
6. More Mind-Body Connections: Introduction to Exposure
7. Introduction to Exposure (Continued)
8. Practicing Exposure and Making Movies
9. Facing Fears and Making Movies
10. Facing Fears and Making Movies
11. Facing Fears and Making Movies
12. Facing Fears and Making Movies
13. Facing Fears and Making Movies
14. Graduation

Access to this group is through Intake and Family Counselling Services which allows for assessment of eligibility criteria.

Day Treatment is an intensive therapeutic classroom setting for children, aged 4-12, experiencing social, emotional or behavioural issues and who have had difficulty being successful in their current school environment. These children and their caregivers may also be at risk for breakdown in their home and/or community.

The program is based on a multidisciplinary milieu treatment model that provides in-class care, family treatment and group therapy. Members of the milieu team include: Child Therapists who work in the classroom, providing evidence based group intervention with the children and individual support to the children as needed; Child and Family Therapists who work with the children providing individual treatment, family treatment and group therapy; Teachers who work in the classroom teaching the academic work; a Consulting Psychologist who conducts assessments, provides clinical consultation; and Supervisors-Day Treatment/Family Treatment Services who provide clinical supervision. Service duration is determined in collaboration between the caregiver and the multidisciplinary milieu team. One year of treatment is the recommended length of service.

There are six classrooms of approximately six students each in three separate schools. Two of the schools are in the Toronto District School Board and one is in the Toronto Catholic District School Board. The Strides Toronto Day Treatment program serves East Toronto (Scarborough) and East York region of Toronto.

Caregiver Readiness

Caregivers are in a state of readiness to make use of the intensive program including weekly participation. Group attendance is mandatory and occurs weekly between September and December. Caregivers participate in weekly family sessions for the remainder of the academic year.