Our Mission | Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health

Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health

About Us

Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health is a collective of mental health professionals and partner of the Ukrainian Canadian Congress Ottawa Branch. We work to provide and meet the current need for psychosocial supports of Ukrainians in Ottawa. We have been doing this by holding free weekly spiritual counselling and psychological support groups, fundraising, and recently partnering with Maidan Market to provide free individual life coaching sessions to refugees. All these resources are provided by our team of therapists, social workers, life coaches and psychiatrists in Ukrainian, Russian and English.

How we Began

OUR STORY

Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health began as an initiative of two psychotherapists and one psychiatry resident looking to help Ukrainians affected by the onset of war. Originally, we provided psychological help by organizing small support groups to the Ukrainian diaspora in Ottawa. We continued to expand services as more Ukrainians began to arrive in Ottawa, helping process PTSD, anxiety, survivors guilt and stress of leaving home for a new country.

With time our collective grew in numbers and services we provide, helping to provide job experience and references to Ukrainian mental health professionals who had fled the war. With this we began to offer life coaching sessions and spiritual counselling. With expanding partnerships, we continue to collaborate with Ukrainian community leaders in Ottawa to gather resources and funding to continue providing most services for free to refugees and the Ukrainian diaspora in Ottawa.

Our Goals

Ottawa Ukrainian Mental Health intends to establish a triage system by focusing on providing resources and services at three major levels.

Firstly, in cooperation with our partners, we aim to create areas of contact for refugees by developing and hosting events. This will help newcomers make connections with one another and additional resources, serving to help them deal with stress and develop a sense of community. This community feeling and access to basic social supports will help address most of the basic mental health need.

Secondly, for individuals who need more specialized services but are not yet in need of specific psychotherapy, life coaching, counselling and spiritual counselling will serve to meet this need by providing individual sessions at the Maidan Market. These sessions focus on short term goal setting, resource connection and life planning. This service is already operational at the Maidan Market.

Thirdly, the final level is individual psychotherapy which will help clients manage and process PTSD, depression, anxiety, and other related difficulties. Just like life coaching and counselling, these psychotherapy sessions will be provided in Ukrainian and Russian and will help close a major gap currently present in the refugee support system. Currently we are addressing this gap by hosting free weekly psychological support groups in-person and online. However, more funding is needed to provide free individual psychotherapy.

This current wave of Ukrainians coming to Ottawa is unprecedented and more substantial than once seen in previous years. In addition to this, these Ukrainians are refugees who are fleeing war that has taken its toll on them physically, financially, and psychologically. The demand for free psychological services in Ukrainian and Russian is vast at the moment and we see the difference our services are making in the refugee community, creating a solid foundation for the new addition to the Ukrainian diaspora here in Ottawa.