Services
Specialized virtual individual supervision for clinicians providing psychotherapy to adult newcomers, immigrants, refugees, refugee claimants, asylum seekers, and people with precarious immigration status.
Clinical work shaped by migration, displacement, persecution, legal uncertainty, family separation, cultural transition, and systemic exclusion cannot be understood through symptoms alone.
A response that appears dysfunctional when separated from its context may be protective, adaptive, or meaningfully connected to ongoing danger and uncertainty. At the same time, contextual understanding must not minimize distress, overlook risk, or replace careful clinical judgment.
This supervision service offers a structured space to examine the person’s experience, the therapeutic relationship, the clinician’s use of self, and the social and institutional conditions entering the therapy room. The aim is to strengthen clinical reasoning, ethical practice, and culturally and contextually responsive care without reducing people to diagnoses, legal categories, or trauma histories.
This is not a university placement, practicum, internship, or client-assignment service. Students and trainees requiring a placement are not accepted.
Supervision may include clinical reasoning and documentation for:
Report review can address the referral question, consent, sources of information, clinical formulation, symptoms and functioning, cultural meanings, alternative explanations, limitations, cautious causation language, recommendations, internal consistency, privacy, and respectful language.
Supervision does not include legal advice, legal strategy, representation, psychological testing, or credibility findings. Clinical opinions must remain within the author’s lawful scope and demonstrated competence.
Refugee-informed supervision is not simply trauma supervision applied to refugees. It requires deliberate attention to how forced migration, legal systems, material conditions, culture, identity, community, and power shape both distress and clinical care. In supervision, we may examine how to:
I aim to create a supervisory relationship in which clinicians can raise uncertainty, mistakes, disagreement, identity, culture, and power without fear of humiliation or retaliation.
Safety, however, does not mean avoiding challenge, corrective feedback, evaluation, or professional accountability. Feedback is respectful, specific, and direct, particularly when competence, ethics, or client well-being may be affected. Supervisees are encouraged to explain their reasoning, request clarification, disagree, identify a rupture, and provide feedback about the supervision relationship.
We establish the scope, frequency, responsibilities, learning goals, feedback process, privacy expectations, and any requirements connected to your regulator, employer, or insurer.
Methods are selected according to your experience, learning goals, clinical responsibilities, and client needs. They may include structured case discussion, de-identified self-report, review of anonymized or appropriately consented records and reports, role-play, reflective exercises, skills rehearsal, directed readings, and review of client-session recordings when separate written client consent and secure arrangements are in place.
Mego Nerses, M.Ed., RP, CCC, is a Registered Psychotherapist, clinical consultant, educator, and trainer with 15 years of post-graduation psychotherapy experience. Since establishing MN Psychotherapy Services in 2011, he has provided more than 10,000 psychotherapy sessions, with the substantial majority of his clinical work involving refugees and newcomers and extensive experience supporting LGBTQ+ refugees.
His clinical and professional background includes adult refugee and newcomer mental health, survivors of torture and persecution, forced displacement, war-related and identity-based violence, precarious immigration status, immigration-related clinical documentation, cross-cultural psychotherapy, work with interpreters, clinical consultation, supervision, post-secondary teaching, program development, and organizational training.
His approach integrates trauma- and violence-informed care, relational and existential perspectives, narrative and meaning-making approaches, systemic and attachment-informed thinking, CBT/CPT-informed work, cultural humility, intersectionality, and anti-oppressive and decolonizing inquiry.
Mego provides psychotherapy and supervision in English, Arabic, and Armenian. Language ability does not imply cultural expertise in every community. Culturally or linguistically specific supervision or referral may sometimes be appropriate.
CRPO does not approve individual supervisors, approve individual supervision courses, or grant a clinical-supervisor designation. Supervision hours submitted for registration purposes are assessed by the applicable regulator.
This service offers Immigration Evaluations for PRRA-related matters, conducted by a Registered Psychotherapist with extensive experience working with refugee and newcomer populations, in English, Arabic, and Armenian.
Before supervision begins, we clarify whether the proposed arrangement fits your professional status, practice context, learning needs, and any applicable regulatory, employer, professional-association, or insurance requirements.
This service does not provide:
Supervisees retain responsibility for practising within their lawful scope and competence, maintaining appropriate insurance, following the requirements of their regulator and workplace, and using their own local or agency emergency procedures. Supervision does not replace independent clinical judgment or transfer the supervisee’s professional accountability to the supervisor.
It may, depending on your registration category, the nature of the supervision, the cases brought, the records available, and CRPO’s requirements. We will discuss the intended purpose during the fit assessment and document the arrangement clearly. CRPO makes the final determination about whether submitted hours are accepted.
Yes, MSW-level Registered Social Workers registered with OCSWSSW may be considered. The service is limited to psychotherapy-focused clinical supervision within the specialized adult newcomer, refugee, forced-migration, and immigration-related scope. It is not general social-work, case-management, administrative, or field-placement supervision. RSW supervisees remain responsible for meeting OCSWSSW requirements and assessing their competence to provide psychotherapy.
No. However, the cases brought to supervision must meaningfully involve newcomer experience, migration, displacement, persecution, settlement, immigration status, or immigration-related clinical documentation. General psychotherapy cases without one of these dimensions fall outside the service scope.
Yes. Supervision may include clinical formulation, ethical reasoning, documentation, and report review for IRB, RPD, RAD, PRRA, H&C, and other immigration-related matters. It does not include legal advice, legal strategy, psychological testing, or opinions about legal credibility.
Information shared in supervision is treated as confidential within the limits established by law, professional standards, the signed supervision agreement, and any authorized agency arrangement. Cases are ordinarily discussed using pseudonyms, initials, or case codes. Identifying information is shared only when necessary and appropriately authorized or required.
Both participants are expected to use private spaces, secure devices and connections, and approved methods for sharing documents. Identifiable clinical information is not sent through ordinary email. Supervision and client sessions are not recorded without the required written agreements and informed consent.
No. Supervision may explore your emotional responses, use of self, professional identity, and relational patterns when they are relevant to clinical work. It is not personal psychotherapy, and concerns requiring therapy should be addressed through an appropriate separate service.
Disagreement can be discussed openly. You are encouraged to explain your reasoning, request clarification, identify relevant context, and respond to evaluative feedback. The supervisor remains responsible for providing an honest professional assessment and taking appropriate action when competence, ethics, or client safety may be affected.
No continuous or emergency coverage is provided. Supervisees must maintain appropriate local or agency emergency procedures and act without waiting for a supervisory response when urgent intervention is required.
The first step is to request a fit consultation. You will be asked for professional information about your registration status, practice setting, experience, client population, supervision needs, and availability. Please do not include client names or unnecessary identifying information in your inquiry.
If you are seeking specialized supervision that combines refugee-informed clinical understanding, contextual formulation, cultural humility, relational depth, practical direction, and transparent professional accountability, I invite you to inquire about fit.
The initial conversation will help us determine whether your professional status, clinical work, learning goals, and supervision requirements align with the service.
Answer these 5 short questions to see if therapy might help you right now.
For the time being, we will be conducting appointments exclusively through virtual means.
Thank you for your understanding.
I am an Ottawa-based Registered Psychotherapist and have a full-time private practice. In the past, I worked in social service agencies for many years. I offer individual, relationship, and sex therapy in English, Arabic, and Armenian to adults 18+, and I do not work with minors.
In 2011, I earned a master’s degree in Counselling from the University of Ottawa. I am a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario (CRPO#001132) with the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario. In addition, I am a Certified Counsellor with the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA#3058). My clinical training focuses on relationship and sex therapy and trauma/PTSD. Since 2013, I have been at Algonquin College as a seasonal professor, teaching courses in mental health and addiction.
I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to publish peer-reviewed articles and contribute chapters concerning Counselling, coming out, and trauma related explicitly to LGBTQ+ refugees and newcomers to Canada. I have presented numerous workshops and continue to offer trainings nationally and internationally on the mental health of LGBTQI+ and SOGIE refugees and asylum seekers.
Professional Work
Early in my professional career, I specialized in individual therapy and served clients with depression, anxiety, PTSD, and grief. Since then, I have taken my clinical work to a higher level and gained more experience in four areas: PTSD and Trauma, Sexuality and Gender Identity, Sex and Relationship Therapy, and Refugee mental health issues. I have received various trainings in these areas since choosing to specialize. As an example, I received training from Division 56, Trauma Psychology, Physicians for Human Rights, and the Global Institute of Forensic Research in writing immigration evaluations for immigration courts. Furthermore, I have completed multiple trainings in trauma/PTSD therapy and relationship therapy (Poly. Kink). I have participated in numerous training opportunities in the field of sex therapy, sexuality, and gender identity.
I am a LGBTQI+/poly/kink/CNM supportive and informed therapist.
Therapeutic approaches
In addition to Narrative Exposure Therapy for PTSD (NET), I have also been trained in Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for PTSD and Experiential Therapy and Focusing. I integrate social justice and rights-based principles into my work as a trauma-informed therapist.
Awards
In recognition of my dedication to helping LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum seekers in Canada, I received the 2017 Humanitarian Award from the Canadian Counselling and Psychotherapy Association (CCPA).
AffiliationsI have an international affiliate membership with Division 56, Trauma Psychology, the American Psychological Association (APA), and the Global Institute of Forensic Research.
