NS Health’s Mental Health Day Treatment Program renamed to reflect treatment & new location

Nova Scotia Health’s Mental Health Day Treatment team has relocated from the Abbie J. Lane Building site of the QEII Health Sciences Centre to the Marshall Treatment Centre on the Nova Scotia Hospital site to make space for the new mental health acute day hospital.

The Mental Health Day Treatment Program has been in existence for many years, supported by an interdisciplinary team that includes psychiatry, social work, occupational therapy, recreational therapy, psychology, and nursing.

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Along with its new location, the service has a new name that reflects its new home in Dartmouth. “The new program will be called the DaRT Program, which stands for Dynamic, attachment focused, Relational Therapy, and is located in Dartmouth,” said Dr. Jackie Kinley, clinical director of the program.

“The program supports adults with complex emotional trauma resulting in unhealthy relationship patterns and behaviours with oneself and others,” Kinley said. “The DaRT program helps people gain knowledge and skills to improve self-awareness, manage, and express their emotions, set goals, build healthy relationships, and cope with or prevent future mental health problems.”

The program is being designed to offer two streams of treatment. The first stream is offered virtually via Zoom. It is a six-week group-based program aimed at building self-awareness. The goal is to scale this program to increase access and help people overcome potential access barriers.

The second stream of the DaRT program will launch later this year, and will also be offered over six weeks. “This stream will be an intensive in-person group program focused on working through and beyond emotional pain from difficult past relationships,” said Kinley. “We hope to help people emotionally resolve and repair past relationship wounds, so they can enter into healthy relationships in the present.”​

People can currently access care and support at the DaRT program through community mental health teams, and/or through a referral from a psychiatrist.

For more information on the DaRT program, call 902-464-3222.