Behind the Business – Jamie D. Brooks, Nicole Barton, & Colette Kelso of COPE Well Groups

Jamie D. Brooks (left), psychologist at COPE Well Groups, posing with psychotherapists Nicole Barton (centre) and Colette Kelso (right). Photo courtesy of Jamie D. Brooks.

Registered psychologist, Jamie D. Brooks, has been interested in group therapy for a long time, with one of the initial sparks coming from participating in group work as a teenager herself.

Of all the courses Jamie took in graduate school on her way to becoming a psychologist, she said group therapy was probably her favourite. She also served as a teaching assistant to the professor who taught that course.

Colette Kelso said she and her colleague, Nicole Barton, both registered psychotherapists, had been running groups at a community agency for many years together.

Nicole said she worked at that agency for 13 years, working specifically with youth and their parents. Colette worked at the agency for 28 years, primarily with parents and youth with significant mental health concerns, she said.

“It was kind of this wonderful getting together and saying, ‘Hey, I’d like to do that’ … ‘Why don’t we do that?’ And that’s how it all came together,” said Colette.

Photo illustration showing two people holding hands. Photo courtesy of Priscilla Du Preez via Unsplash.

From there, Jamie, Colette, and Nicole formed COPE Well Groups, a service that offers ways to manage sources of stress that can interfere with a person’s life and relationships with others.

“We’re teaching parents the skills to be their teen’s support person, and to build that connection so that they can support their teens with the very difficult task of being a teenager, and oftentimes teenagers who have significant mental health concerns as well,” said Colette.

Created during the COVID-19 pandemic, COPE Well Groups was offered exclusively online, said Nicole. “We were not able to facilitate in-person at the time… We wanted people to still be able to access services from their homes and in the comfort of their homes.”

“It was a time where there was an increase in distress in families. So we started our first groups to support parents in order to support their young people,” Colette added.

COPE Well Groups is now proud to offer their teen sessions, Managing Big Emotions, in-person. Their sessions for adults (Manage Life Stressors & Build Self-Compassion), parents and caregivers (Manage Big Emotions While Building a Connection with Your Teen), and women in midlife and beyond (COPE Well with Change: A Supportive Skills Group) are offered via Zoom for flexibility.

Photo illustration showing a video conference on a laptop. Photo courtesy of Chris Montgomery via Unsplash.

“Individual therapy is important, but there’s a benefit to group therapy in terms of a shared experience with a group of people,” Jamie said, adding the group environment makes the individual participants involved feel like they are not alone in their experience.

“I think the thing that I enjoy the most is seeing how people can come in and really just connect with one another and share that common ground,” Nicole said.

Jamie said she appreciates hearing the creative ways that group participants apply the skills learned in previous sessions to their lives. “I find that really rewarding,” she said.

When it comes to what is in store for COPE Well Groups in the future, Nicole said the sky’s the limit, adding that every time she, Jamie, and Colette get together, they are already thinking about other groups that could be created where there is demand.

“And really, I think that’s the essence of the group: seeing what the community needs, and trying to fulfill it. And I think that because we have such a wide variety of skills, there’s so many other groups that we can be adding on here,” she said.