Ottawa River Integrative Mental Health

10/31/2025

Happy and Healthy Hallowe’en from the whole team at Ottawa River Integrative Mental Health Inc!

10/30/2025

Join us for our Free Ottawa River Grand Rounds the first Friday of the Month at 1 pm ET.

We have been offering these gifts of love to our community since ***2018***!! For November 2025 we have the founder of Empower psychedelics, a not for profit bridging industry and government running a clinical trial on psychedelics and group therapy for healing PTSD in First Responders.

This is your chance students, therapists and first responders to learn about one of the newest clinical trials which is now in the recruitment stage.

Go to Events Page at https://ottawariverintegrative.com or see link in bio for this LIVE Online event with Jon Hill!

10/30/2025

Join us for our Free Ottawa River Grand Rounds the first Friday of the Month at 1 pm ET. We have been offering these gifts of love to our community since ***2018***!!

For November 2025 we have the founder of Empower psychedelics, a not for profit bridging industry and government running a clinical trial on psychedelics and group therapy for healing PTSD in First Responders.

This is your chance students, therapists and first responders to learn about one of the newest clinical trials which is now in the recruitment stage.

Go to Events Page at https://ottawariverintegrative.com or see link in bio for this LIVE Online event with Jon Hill!

10/21/2025

Team photos at 14 Chamberlain in the Glebe today! What a feeling of team connection and joy. Looking forward to seeing the awesome work of

10/12/2025

How we feel and the emotions we experience are a central part of our mental health. Conversely how we respond to emotions is critical for our health, mental and physical. While they can perplexing, stubborn, frustrating, annoying, frightening and downright depressing at times, emotions are a fundamental and necessary part of brain functioning. In fact, they are central to being human.

Unfortunately societal beliefs often tells us we shouldn’t have emotions or some emotions are bad. Telling your brain it shouldn’t have emotions is like telling your heart not to beat or your lungs not to breathe, and it doesn’t make your brain very happy.

Emotions don’t always feel nice and can make us want to run away from them. And like any avoidance, short term this seems to work, we feel relieved. But inside your brain is feeling pretty annoyed at trying to hold it all in.

How you respond to your emotions is important. Research shows suppressing, berating and shaming emotions doesn’t help us deal with them at all and just creates more stress and make emotions feel even more difficult.

Naming, validating, expressing and recognising emotions seems to help us process them and help us become friends with them, rather than them having power over us. It seems to soothe those emotions and instead of adding a layer of more stress and difficult feelings, helps us deal with the ones we have.

read more about the science of emotions and how we can help our emotions in my books
📕‘A Toolkit for your Emotions’.
📚 A toolkit for modern life
📖 A toolkit for happiness

10/10/2025

Call and book with our outstanding male psychotherapists! Randy Stevens MA RPQ & Kevin Vlack MA RPQ https://ottawariverintegrative.com

10/10/2025

Trauma changes your body and mind. https://www.psypost.org/childhood-trauma-appears-to-leave-a-lasting-metabolic-signature/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=linkedin #

Research in Biological Psychiatry indicates that people who experienced childhood trauma carry unique metabolic patterns into adulthood. These blood-based chemical changes may help explain why early-life adversity increases vulnerability to both physical and mental illnesses later in life.

10/05/2025

Our October 2025 Grand Rounds facilitated by Kevin Vlack RPQ features an interesting exploration of the reclamation of pleasure, power imbalances and the ethics of sensuality in psychotherapy with Tantra teacher Bryarly McEachern MSc bodyworker and Tantra teacher. Give it a listen!

https://youtu.be/aLFfcHhWFrQ

***NOTE that technical difficulties froze the video for a good portion of the presentation but the audio is all there for your listening pleasure***

In this insightful Ottawa River Grand Rounds talk for October 2025, Kevin Vlack RPQ Ottawa River Integrative Mental Health Psychotherapy Intern interviews ou...

10/05/2025

Our September 2025 Grand Rounds talk is up! Please share Anne Dure's research for a more beautiful world.

Confronting the Adultification Bias and its Impact on Black Girls and Women

Join us in this informative professional development webinar introduced by Karen Siwak RPQ Ottawa River Integrative Mental Health Psychotherapy Intern and ta...

10/02/2025

It's not always obvious when therapy is helping—but here are some things you may notice about yourself!


Did you know LFS offers subsidized counselling services across Southwestern Alberta? Whether you're in Lethbridge, Magrath, Pincher Creek, the Crowsnest Pass, or anywhere else in our service area, our counsellors are ready to help. https://www.lfsfamily.ca/counselling-outreach-education

10/02/2025