Brief Treatment Services
Who Can Use This Service?
Children, youth and their families can use this service to address children’s mental health issues, family difficulties and parenting struggles that are better served using a focused treatment model. During the intake process, the Social Worker will complete an assessment of the referral concerns and presenting issues and based on this assessment, determine if brief-focused treatment is the most appropriate treatment option.
More specifically this service is available for
- Parents
- Individual children and youth
- Families
What Is Offered?
Brief-focussed Treatment Services provides the opportunity to meet with a counsellor for up to four (4) sessions within a two (2) month timeframe. A brief treatment plan will be developed outlining the goal of treatment, the key strategies and the outcomes to achieve the identified treatment goals. Once assigned to a counsellor, the counsellor will be responsible for setting up the appointments.
Children and Youth: Brief Treatment Services may be offered to children and youth on an individual basis but may also require the involvment of their families. It is an effective treatment service for a wide variety of child and adolescent mental health concerns.
Parents: Brief-focused Treatment may also be offered to parents specifically. It is an effective treatment service for a wide variety of parenting challenges including child management issues. The focus of this treatment is on strengthening parenting by providing support and education. It may be very helpful in situations when the child or adolescent has refused services for themselves or where parents are involved in a high conflict separation or divorce matter, which is having a negative impact on their child(ren).
How Will This Service Help?
Our goal is to help individuals and families address their current difficulties using an effective and focused treatment that respects the uniqueness of each individual and their particular situation. Specifically, this form of treatment tends to be indicated for
- Grief and loss depnding on the situation
- Parenting and child management issues
- High conflict and divorce situations (parents only)
- Supporting change or previous treatments
- Some family difficutlies
- Some social, emotional and behavioural challenges
The focus of treatment is solving problems and finding solutions, developing skills, strengthening capacity, enhancing knowledge, developing safety plans, improving coping, reducing stress and improving overall functioning.
How Can You Find Out More Or Access This Service?
If you are interested in learning more or making a referral, we accept requests for this service from directly from the parent or guardian, and youth themselves if they are over the age of 12 years. Others such as doctors, teachers, child welfare staff or other professionals can encourage and support referrals, however, parents and/or youth must request the service directly.
Call 343-5000 to request an appointment with our intake services staff who will gather some information and discuss with you whether this service or another one would best meet your needs.
Other Information And Quick Links:
Brief Therapy has been around for a long time and is an effective treatment for certain child and family mental health issues. Often people believe that long term treatment is better than short term. This is not true. It really depends on the presenting issues, the goals of treatment, and what the client brings to the treatment process including interest, motivation and time. Below are a few links to help you understand what brief treatment is and how it may help.
