No. While referrals from physicians, allied health professionals, and community agencies are welcome and appreciated, self-referrals are also happily accepted.

Some private insurance providers may require a medical doctor’s referral before providing access to coverage. Please check with your provider for more details.

There is a lot to cover in a short period of time!

1. Confidentiality - so you know what will and will not happen to the information you share.

2. Basic demographic information: name, age, relationship status, work/school status

3. Brief description of your presenting concerns/the reasons you reached out to me.

4. The work that I do, how I may be of help, administrative details (e.g., fees, session length, my availability, session frequency).

5. Next steps (e.g., scheduling the first session)

Each client has his/her/their own time slot that matches the frequency of our work together (e.g., weekly or bi-weekly). No one else will be able to access that time slot unless you had changed the day/time of our session for that week. An exception to this is if we decide to have a more flexible schedule for a variety of reasons (e.g., no regular time slots are available, your work schedule might make a set day/time difficult).

To get the most out of therapy, the expectation is that all clients will attend sessions regularly, and only cancel/reschedule them when absolutely necessary.

Yes. Research findings from multiple studies conducted over the years indicates that virtual therapy is just as effective as in-person therapy for a wide variety of presenting concerns.

There are two virtual therapy options: Zoom or a phone call. If meeting over Zoom, I will email you a link that you can use to access all sessions. Clicking on the link will bring you to the waiting room, so there is no risk of joining a call with another client. If meeting by phone, I would call you at the start time of the session.

Unfortunately, no.

In accordance with jurisdiction regulations, I am only allowed to meet with clients who are physically located in the provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, or Nova Scotia during the time of the session. There may be exceptions for other jurisdictions (e.g., countries, states) as well. We can discuss these exceptions as they arise.

As for where to attend the session, I recommend finding a private space where no one else can overhear our session.

It depends on the specific service.

We use Zoom Pro, which is compliant with Canadian data protection regulations, including the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA), and the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA), which, among other things, means it meets standards for high levels of security that make our sessions unlikely to be hacked/accessed. We also enabled the end-to-end encryption setting, which makes the possibility of someone else accessing our session/data extremely unlikely.

The phone, unfortunately, is not considered a secure form of communication. However, the chances of someone gaining access to our phone call (assuming cell phones are being used), is very small. As a result, we can reasonably assume that the phone call would be confidential.