What to Expect When You Book a Session with a Clincian at CFIR for Psychological Services

Here’s what you can expect in your first meeting with a mental health professional at CFIR. In an initial session, you’ll have an opportunity to share your concerns, and talk about the thoughts, emotional reactions, behaviours or relationship issues that are of greatest concern to you. Your clinician at CFIR will ask you questions to further understand the nature of your difficulties, and working with you, will identify your treatment goals. He or she will also provide you, if needed by you, strategies to address any symptoms that are distressing for you— so you’ll have some tools to deal with any symptoms that seem unmanageable. Following an initial session, a comprehensive assessment will be conducted, including a clinical interview and administration of scientific, evidence-based questionnaires, so that we can identity the factors that have contributed to your concerns. In a following session, we’ll provide you with feedback and continue gathering more information about the origin of your problems. We will also put forward a treatment plan to address your issues and provide you with a sense of how long treatment should take, and what type of progress and change might be expected over time. Depending on your concerns, and our assessment (and any diagnosis if rendered or requested), we will make recommendations about whether a specific treatment approach, or a combination of approaches may be required to help you with your problem.

Associates at CFIR only provide scientific, evidence-based treatment interventions.

Our Centre only accepts clinicians who are experienced in many different treatment models to join. We believe that not every treatment fits with every client, and therefore, value the Associates’ abilities to flexibly address concerns using different treatment approaches (e.g., clinicians at CFIR can employ cognitive-behavioural, emotion-focused, psychodynamic and systemic approaches). 

Clinicians at CFIR are, therefore, trained and experienced to address the perceptual, cognitive, emotional, behavioural, interpersonal and socio-cultural dimensions of your concerns. Mental health practitioners at our Ottawa and Toronto locations also offer various short and long-term evidence-based treatment options.

In terms of treatment, we believe that not every treatment fits with every client. Associates are flexible in being able to provide different treatment approaches (e.g., our clinicians can employ cognitive-behavioural, emotion-focused, psychodynamic and systemic approaches). We also believe that many different interventions are required to help people change and grow, and offer our clients both short and long-term evidence-based treatment options.

We are also flexible in terms of being able to switch our treatment approach with you, if necessary (e.g., switching from CBT to other treatments as needed). We typically use some approaches to help you address distressing symptoms, and other approaches to help you to obtain a deeper, more meaningful understanding of your concerns and with the purpose of developing a more secure, resilient self and strengthening your capacity for relationships.