Doctoral Associate
Jessica Chuchin
M.A.
Most children arrive expecting something formal. What they find instead is someone genuinely curious about who they are, rather than the diagnosis or the difficulty that brought them in. Families often say the first session felt lighter than they expected, and that the conversation they had been dreading turned out to be possible after all.
I am a big believer in the side quest, whether that is an unplanned bike ride or turning a routine grocery run into an event. Main character energy, but make it a Tuesday.
You don't have to have it figured out.
How Jessica works
Some families come in with a new medical diagnosis and no idea how to talk to their child about it. Others come because worry has taken over bedtime, or because a stomach ache arrives every school morning and no test has explained it. Jessica works across all of it.
Much of her work sits where the medical world meets the emotional one. She has trained at The Hospital for Sick Children, at St. Michael's Hospital within a Family Health Team, and at BC Children's Hospital, and she is at home in the space between a child's health condition and how that child is actually coping with it. She also works with anxiety and OCD, low mood, ADHD and autism, emotion and behaviour regulation, learning differences, and parents who want help figuring out what their child needs.
A session might look like play, building something, talking about the week, comfortable silence, skill building, or sitting with something hard. It depends on the child, and it depends on the day.
Clinical approach
What she is paying attention to.
Jessica starts from something simple. Every child wants to do well, and they do well when they can. When a child is given confidence in themselves and the sense that their own experience matters, their world opens up.
In a session she is watching for what sits underneath. The nonverbal cues, the things left unsaid, the shift in the room when a topic gets close. Which game a child chooses. When they relax and when they guard up. All of it is information.
She draws on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT), approaches informed by dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), exposure and response prevention (ERP), emotion-focused therapy, and motivational interviewing, all held within a trauma-informed lens. She also works with the systems around a child, because no child is coping in isolation from their family, their school, or their medical team.
We work together to create a shared language for what's going on in your family. Sometimes it starts with a drawing, a game, or just a shrug and an I don't know, and the rest follows from there.
Areas of focus
What Jessica works with.
Languages: English
Background and credentials.
Education and training
PhD, Clinical Psychology (in progress)
Toronto Metropolitan University
MA, Clinical Psychology
Toronto Metropolitan University
BSc (Honours), Neuroscience
University of Western Ontario
Professional associationsOntario Psychological Association (OPA)
Canadian Psychological Association (CPA)
Post-doctoral fellowship
BC Children's Hospital
Clinical trainingBC Children's Hospital
Pre-doctoral residency
The Hospital for Sick Children
St. Michael's Hospital
Family Health Team
Private practice
Additional trainingADOS-2
Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule
ADI-R
Autism Diagnostic Interview, Revised
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