Rod Taylor, BA, MSW, RCSW
Clinical Social Worker
I have over 16 years of experience working as a clinical counsellor for children, youth, and their families. I hold a Masters of Social Work degree from the University of Victoria and I am a registered clinical social worker in good standing with the BC College of Social Workers. I have worked in numerous clinical, analytical, and problem solving positions, including clinical mental health, emergency mental health, crisis intervention, and forensic psychiatric services, all specific to children & youth.
Although the province of BC recognizes age 19 as being a legal adult, I continue to see clients beyond that age, as there remains a youthful state of brain development for people in their early 20’s.
Throughout my career, I have acquired extensive training and knowledge in the application of comprehensive mental health assessments, cognitive and dialectical behavioural therapy, applied behavioural analysis, and differential diagnosis, all specific to child & youth mental health. I have extensive experience providing evidence based practices as a means of assessing, diagnosing, and treating children and youth who have been impacted by a wide spectrum of complex mental health issues.
The impact of mental health issues for a child or young person can be very impairing. Equally stressful is finding the appropriate services to alleviate their mental health concern. I pride myself on assessing the underlying cause of someone’s mental health concerns, followed by developing a mutually agreed upon treatment plan, with the end goal being to help people get happy and healthy so that they no longer feel the need for counselling services. Nothing makes me happier than to hear a young person or their family say, “Things are really going well. I don’t think counselling is needed anymore.” After all, no one ever sees me when they’re happy :)
My career, which has spanned 26 years, has always involved working with children, youth, and their families. It’s where my passion lies, which is why I don’t work with adults or do other forms of therapy such as marriage counselling. My overall career experience is quite diverse and includes working with high-risk youth as a street outreach worker, conducting child protection and youth probation services in the Innu community of Sheshatshiu, Labrador, conducting volunteer outreach work with ‘street kids’ in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, working as a mental health clinician throughout Northern BC, working with criminally involved youth in the forensic psychiatric system, and providing frontline clinical counselling services within a variety of indigenous communities. My career has allowed me to provide services to families from diverse cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. For the majority of my clinical career, I have worked as as clinical counsellor with indigenous people.
I am a husband and father to two children. Outside of my work as a clinician, I divide my time between family commitments, doing my best to be a husband and father, skateboarding, and playing guitar in a hard rock band with my skate buddies. Starting skateboarding at age 45 has been a humbling, yet an incredibly fun experience. Nothing keeps your ego in-check like being out performed by a pre-teen at the skatepark :) Skateboarding is kind of like life, you have to fail a bunch of times in order to learn how to do it right.