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What are your payment and cancellation policies?
Payment:
I accept payment by direct deposit. Payment is due on the day of the session, before the session begins.
Cancellation:

Clients are expected to make an effort to re-schedule all missed or cancelled appointments.

If you cancel an appointment without providing 48 hours notice, a late cancellation fee will be applied to your account. The late cancellation fee is the full cost of a session ($231.65).

I can waive this fee if you successfully re-schedule within a weeks time if you successfully re-schedule the appointment within a weeks time. Please note that I do my best to provide you with options that work for your schedule, however I cannot guarantee my availability.

If you arrive to the session more than 15 minutes late, a ‘no show’ fee equivalent to the full cost of a session will be applied to your account.

Are your services covered by OHIP or private insurance?

As a Registered Psychotherapist (RP) my services are covered either in full or in part by some insurance providers, bursaries for students with disabilities (BSWD), student healthcare plans, and Employment Assistance Programmes (EAP). Check with your provider to ensure that you have coverage for psychotherapy from a “Registered Psychotherapist”. I provide official receipts that you may use to submit to your insurance provider for reimbursement.

How do you protect my privacy and confidentiality?

I take your privacy and confidentiality very seriously. In addition to following the standards of practise outlined by the Personal Health Information Protection Act (PHIPA) and the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO) I have added additional safeguards to protect you and your loved ones privacy and confidentiality because I understand how neurodivergent and genderdivergent people’s personal health information is far more identifiable than neurotypical, cisgender, heterosexual people’s personal health information, and thus requires special consideration and care.

For example, I am very careful about selecting trustworthy healthcare providers when conducting case consultations, and am sure to disclose as little information as possible, including basic demographic information that is often considered a routine part of the case consultation format.

Before we begin working together, we will review and discuss my detailed confidentiality agreement outlining how I protect your confidentiality, the legal limits to confidentiality, navigating issues around conflicts of interest. We will also thoroughly discuss any issues or concerns that you may have, to ensure the appropriateness of and your consent to the terms of service.

In order to work together, you must have a) have a private space where you can meet with me alone without being seen or overheard, and b) have a securely encrypted internet connection, up to date anti-virus software and c) keep up to date on cyber security methods and follow them. Without these elements in place, I am not able to provide psychotherapy and counselling.

Is your practice accessible?

All sessions are currently being provided remotely (either by telephone or through my secure medical-grade clinical video conferencing system) during COVID-19. I will continue to offer remote sessions regardless of the future status of the pandemic.  My video conferencing platform is equipped with a chat / text function, and can easily be adapted to offer: audio-only based communication, text and video-based-only communication, or video, audio, and text-based communication. I am open to adapting these approaches and generating new, alternative approaches.

How long does it take to see results?

It depends on your circumstances, needs and goals, and the type of psychotherapy.

In order to do justice to the depth and breadth of therapeutic work, I focus on providing long-term and mid-term psychotherapy. To give you a rough idea – mid-term ranges between approximately 24 – 48 appointments (6 months – 1 year), and long-term ranges around 48 appointments to several years.

When deciding on fit with a psychotherapist, please keep in mind that it is not possible to ‘shorten’ mid-term and long-term psychotherapy in order to access short-term or brief psychotherapy, as they involve two very separate and distinct therapeutic approaches.

How is therapy structured?

The first few sessions focus on orienting ourselves: ascertaining what the issues are, building a strong line of communication, coming to an understanding of eachother’s process, and formulating intentions / goals, an approach, plan, and estimated duration together.

I strive to strike a balance between learning about your past experiences (to better understand your present experience) while generating practical tools and strategies to alleviate the most pressing issues at hand. As the more acute issues are attended to, more space is opened up to uncover the ‘root causes’ of these issues so that they can be addressed at the core, and future issues can be prevented.

Usually I recommend that we work in 6 month increments, where we reserve a full session once every 6 months to reflect on our work together and discuss whether to close, pause, or continue, though some clients prefer reflecting every 3 months or so. At the same time, reflection and feedback are build into the structure of each session as an ongoing process of orienting and re-orienting ourselves throughout our work together.