Mental health problems relate to our behaviour, emotions and relationships.

Serious mental health problems in childhood can include depression, unmanageable behaviour, and an inability to get along with others.

These problems can cause much stress and heartache to children, their families, their teachers, and the community. In addition, they often lead to even more serious mental health problems in adulthood.

A wide range of programs and services staffed by well-trained professionals who are connected to other local and provincial services is available to support your child and your family.

School-Based Mental Health – YooMagazine.net(top)

YooMagazine.net is an interactive health awareness program designed for young people, parents and teachers. The goal of this online magazine is to provide young people with accurate physical and mental health information to improve overall well-being and provide helpful hints towards some of the tough decisions our youth are faced with today. For example:

WrapAround (Nipissing)(top)

WrapAround is an innovative team-based process that assists both individuals and families with complex needs to find solutions to unique problems and improve overall well-being. WrapAround is community based and is supported by a partnership of community agencies, organizations, businesses and volunteers.

Through the WrapAround process, a team of people chosen by the family, including friends, family and some professionals, work together to identify and connect the family to helpful supports and services. WrapAround provides a trained facilitator who works with the family to identify a team and bring them together to create a plan to address the family’s needs. The plan is individualized, and is built on the family’s strengths and assets and respects the family culture.

Peer Mediation/ Restorative Practices(top)

The Peer Mediation/Restorative Practices worker is an ambassador of the Restorative Practice model in the community providing training to those interested in becoming facilitators as well as promoting the model through public speaking engagements in schools and to interested groups. As the restorative practice model is more widely adopted, the worker will support the development of a local Restorative Practices network.

Treatment Foster Care (top)

Treatment Foster Care is a community partnership between Hands, and the Nipissing-Parry Sound Children’s Aid Society whereby children who are best served in a family environment are placed in a specialized family foster care setting with a high level of support from both organizations. Hands facilitators provide training and ongoing mental health clinical support to foster parents who are interested in offering treatment foster care in their homes.

Intensive Service Coordination (top)

Intensive service coordination is available at a community level and provides system capacity for child/youth centered, family focused service planning requiring inter-agency and cross-sectoral collaboration.

The outcome of intensive service coordination for a child/youth and his/her family/caregiver will be an integrated service plan with identified, measurable goals, and services and supports that are joined up effectively to address identified needs in support of goal achievement. The integrated service plan is agreed to by the child/youth (where appropriate), family/caregiver and participating agencies, and its implementation is a shared responsibility.

The Intensive Service Coordinator provides systems level coordination and support to complex special needs child and their families in those situations where, because of the number of services involved and/or the level of support needed and/or the complexity of the situation, additional service coordination is required.