Community-Based Care
Good mental health care does not require an institutional setting to be rigorous. Our model is community-based: accessible, personal, and responsive to the people we actually serve.
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About usThe team behind Breakthrough Therapies.
A small group of clinicians who own the practice, provide the care, and train everyone who joins them.
The practice
A house, not an institution.
Breakthrough Therapies is owned and led by the clinicians who provide the care. Treatment happens in a private house in the north of Toronto rather than an institutional setting, because a community-based model can hold the same clinical standard while being far easier to actually reach.
Every clinician here was personally trained and mentored rather than simply hired, so the consistency of your care does not rest on any one person. Dr. Dawn DeCunha founded the practice in 2020, on the evidence-based clinical foundation she had already spent decades building.
What we hold to
Our values.
Clinician-Led
Breakthrough Therapies is owned and led by the clinicians who provide care. That means every decision is driven by what is right for our patients, first and always.
Mentorship at Our Core
Every clinician on our team is personally trained and mentored, not simply hired. We are building something meant to last, with a genuine long-term commitment to this field.
Evidence, Always
We hold ourselves to the same evidentiary standard as any other area of clinical medicine: outcome measurement, peer review, and honest reporting of what we find.
Accessibility
We work to remove barriers to care, including flexible payment approaches and our Safe at Home program for patients who cannot easily travel to us.
Our team
The people who will look after you.
Founder and Clinical Director
Dr. Dawn DeCunha, Ed.D., C.Psych.
Clinical and Educational Psychologist
A clinical and educational psychologist with more than three decades of practice, registered to work across the full lifespan. She founded Psychology Works in 1992 and continues to lead it, and founded Breakthrough Therapies in 2020 to bring medicine-assisted psychotherapy to patients for whom standard treatment has fallen short.
Mentor since 2020 and guest lecturer since 2022, Certificate in Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research, The Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research, California Institute of Integral Studies. She holds registration with the College of Psychologists and Behaviour Analysts of Ontario.
The Center for Psychedelic Therapies and Research, California Institute of Integral Studies, does not endorse or sponsor this programme.
Medical Team
Mareena Mathew, NP
Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner
Over 20 years of experience at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, bringing deep knowledge of severe mental health conditions and of medication management.
Therapists
Terra Dafoe
Clinical Psychologist
More than 20 years working with complex mental illness, through a trauma-focused lens.
Jill Schroeder
Psychologist
A diverse background working with youth and with first responders managing chronic mental illness.
Monica Lau
Registered Psychotherapist
Works with grief, identity, trauma and life transitions, and brings a somatic component to medicine-assisted care.
Tara Jane Wodelet
Registered Psychotherapist
A former midwife with more than 20 years of experience, with a particular interest in the LGBTQ+ community.
Every portrait on this page is a photograph of the person named beside it. We do not use stock headshots.
Want to know who you would be working with?
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