Heather Fawcett joined the OPC as its executive director in 2023. She is also one of its practicing registered psychotherapists with more than 16 years’ experience.

With its cold temperatures and long, dark nights, January has a bad reputation for being a depressing month. How do you distinguish between Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and depression?

With SAD, you have a lot of the depressive symptoms. Oversleeping …it’s a desire to hibernate, to become socially withdrawn. You crave carbohydrates and comfort food. …It’s just a low mood. It can feel like a heaviness… like things have become too much effort. …. And if you’re experiencing it for the first time, it can be hard to identify … because it’s not something that is sudden onset. It’s not that you wake up one day and you feel depressed, or you’ve got brain fog… It’s definitely the frog in the hot water kind of scenario. It starts off and the heat gets turned up and you become used to it, but you know that you’re just not yourself.

[It’s seasonal.] We’re getting a lot less light. For some people, it makes a huge difference to their mood. That’s one of the differences between depression and SAD… Depression doesn’t automatically lift because the days start to get longer. You might feel better, but you still don’t feel yourself.”

[Therapists] know what markers to look for, so we can help somebody determine if it’s SAD or situational or even chronic depression. We cannot officially diagnose, so we would say go talk to your doctor.

When people are depressed, they often hear: ‘You just need to get out more.’ ‘You just need to have more faith.’ especially in Christian circles. ‘You need to stop worrying’. … It’s a biochemical situation. It’s not choice.

If the causes are biochemical, how can therapy help?

Psychotherapy can help somebody understand what’s going on, to assess and develop the coping skills and techniques. What’s healthy? What’s working? How come? What’s that accomplishing?… Part of our training is to know what questions to ask and what to look for, which makes it different than talking to a friend.

With SAD, it is more a case of understanding or learning that this is simply how your body reacts.

That’s one of the reasons why medication works in conjunction with therapy. It works really well because you get to understand what’s going on, why it’s going on, what triggered it, what you can do about it, build your coping skills. Do that and take a serotonin uptake inhibitor, which is basically an antidepressant, and the serotonin is in your system, and you can really start to feel like life is manageable again.

What do you find most rewarding in your practice?

When a client says, ‘I don’t need you anymore. It’s been good. I can see the changes, and I feel like I just don’t need to see you.’ That’s awesome….My goal is always to do myself out of a job. Or when a client says, ‘I tried that thing and it worked,’ or ‘I never knew I had this much value.’ Life changing insights.

What do you want readers to know about the OPC?

It’s a place where you can talk and explore with freedom from condemnation…. There are so few places we experience that….We protect dignity….It’s a place where you can feel secure without the need to have your defences up. It’s a place where it doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what you’re struggling with.

The other thing is that, honestly, whatever you’re facing, it doesn’t have to stay this way. One of my favourite quotes is from and Eagles’ song. “So often time it happens that we live our lives in chains, and we never even know we hold the key.” That’s what we do. We find the keys so that you don’t have to have the chains.

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Mickeelie Farrell just joined the OPC team in June, and kids have a special place in her practice.

Does September and back-to-school stress increase calls for counselling?

The transition back into the school setting can be quite difficult for a lot of kids — some of those academic demands, especially for teens feeling the pressures in high school to figure life out. And there’s a lot of new social anxieties that kids and teens seem to be facing these days…. Every generation is different, but these are kids who grew up in school in years during a pandemic and that has radically changed things for them… At least for myself and my other colleagues who work with kids, we definitely see an uptick in appointments. Maybe not immediately at the beginning of September when school starts, but once things are settling in, some of the cracks or difficulties or challenges are starting to come up, then it can be a really difficult transition time for kids, parents, families as a whole.

I’ve worked with kids mostly age 9, 10 and up, a lot of teens and young adults as well. Really the purpose is, whatever they’re going through, to give them that safe place to just be seen and known and talk through whatever is coming up in their lives. Sometimes that’s with their caregiver or their parents, whoever their main attachment figure is, in the room. Sometimes not. It depends on what the family needs.

Do questions about managing screen time come up often?

Managing screen time has been a common issue that’s come up with some of my younger clients, especially. For teens, it seems to be a bit more normalized. They’re at an age in development where, they probably have a phone, and they’re probably on social media, but even the management of that can be quite tricky.

For some kids, [being online] is a much more comfortable space to exist than maybe the day-to-day social environments that they find themselves in. So trying to find that balance with kids and parents. ‘Okay, you feel safe online, but online isn’t always safe. And screens and loads of screen time aren’t always good.’ The tricky thing with it is it becomes such a regulator of emotion for a lot of kids.

So, it’s a question of how do we find a balance between the benefits of technology, the ways it connects us, the creativity it can really promote in kids and teens, but also being aware of the shadow sides and the dangers of it as well. The fact that real life is still happening around them and how do they how do they manage both in a way that’s healthy? How do parents and teachers and mentors and coaches and friends and friends’ parents help kids manage those two different worlds that they sometimes live in, remembering that both do exist and that kids are sort of in that tension between the two.

Are there lots of concerns about addictive algorithms?

I would say that that one isn’t generationally located. I think it’s universal, like how I see older generations interact with their Facebook feeds or even how my generation of Millennials when we got hooked on Instagram or even on TikTok and the addictive nature that it has in all of our lives. All of us have inevitably been caught in that late-night doom scroll where we’re just feeling flat and exhausted, can’t do anything else and then you get stuck in and the algorithm feeds on that….There’s also now AI to be added into all of that in many ways and layers. …All of us, I think, are struggling with it in different ways.

What do you find most rewarding in your work?

I have a lot of clients who are neurodivergent…seeing a rise [in the numbers of people] navigating that well with kids and families, whether it’s ADHD or ASD (autism), and families being really adaptive to their approach with kids and just letting kids have a space to breathe and find their way in the neurotypical world has been quite rewarding. I see lots of it, not just in my work with kids, but also late diagnosed adults as well. Seeing the shifts and maybe the move away from like stigma or some of the mixed messaging or the confusing messages that maybe my generation grew up with. Seeing a shift in knowledge and adaptations to meet kids’ needs in that way has also been cool to be a part of, but it is also just really rewarding to see kids find ways through life that are just different and nuanced and unique for each of them.

The OPC’s Counselling Support Fund helps support people impacted by mental health issues who lack the financial resources to access mental healthcare. To donate: theopc.ca/donate/

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