About Elena Darmos
Elena Darmos is a Registered Psychotherapist and a PhD-trained neuroscientist at Toronto Mental Health Clinic. It is a rare combination in clinical practice, and it shapes the way she works with every client.
Elena's path to therapy started in the lab. She spent years studying how the brain adapts to stress, how learning changes neural circuits, and why some nervous systems recover from injury or trauma while others get stuck. The more she understood the biology, the clearer it became that most people navigating conditions like ADHD, post-concussion syndrome, chronic pain, and FND weren't being offered treatment that reflected what was actually happening in their brains. They were being offered generic care, or care that treated their mind and body as if they were separate systems.
Her clinical work is built to correct that. Every session runs on the premise that psychological distress has measurable neurobiological correlates, that the brain and body are inseparable, and that effective treatment has to engage both.
Clinical Philosophy
Elena's philosophy in a sentence: treatment should match what's actually happening in your nervous system, not a diagnostic label.
In practice that means she starts every client relationship by building a working model of what's driving your specific presentation, the biology, the behavioural patterns, the psychological factors, and the social context. Then she chooses the tools that target the real driver, not the surface complaint. Someone with "anxiety" who really has undiagnosed adult ADHD needs different treatment from someone with anxiety rooted in trauma, even if the symptoms look similar from the outside.
This is why Elena is often the clinician clients come to after several other tries haven't worked. She's known for the moment early in treatment when a client says "no one has ever explained it to me that way before," because she's not just naming symptoms, she's explaining the mechanism underneath them. Understanding why your brain does what it does turns out to be therapeutic in itself.
Clinical Approach
Elena draws on a range of evidence-based modalities, integrating them according to the specific needs and goals of each client:
- Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT): structured, skills-based work targeting thoughts, behaviours, and emotional responses
- Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT): building psychological flexibility and values-driven living
- Somatic and body-based approaches: addressing how chronic stress, pain, and trauma are held in the nervous system
- CBT for Insomnia (CBT-I): the first-line evidence-based treatment for chronic insomnia
- Neuroscience-informed psychoeducation: helping clients understand the biology behind their experience
This integrative framework lets Elena work effectively with complex, overlapping presentations. For example, a client navigating ADHD alongside chronic pain and long-term anxiety simultaneously. Where a purely CBT or purely somatic clinician might address one thread, Elena tends to see all three as parts of a single dysregulated system and treat them together.
Areas of Expertise
Elena has developed particular depth in several areas that are often underserved by generalist practices.
Adult ADHD and Executive Function. Elena understands ADHD not as a deficit of attention, but as a difference in self-regulatory architecture, a pattern of dysregulation in the frontostriatal circuits that govern focus, motivation, and reward-based decision-making. She works with adults who have often spent decades quietly wondering if something was wrong. Some come already diagnosed and looking for the therapy piece to complement medication; others arrive at her office suspecting ADHD for the first time and needing help thinking through assessment. Her treatment integrates executive-function scaffolding, CBT specifically adapted for adult ADHD, and, often the piece that changes everything, rebuilding the self-concept that decades of "why can't I just do this?" has eroded.
Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) and Post-Concussion Syndrome. Elena's neuroscience background gives her a distinct perspective on conditions where the line between neurological and psychological is blurred by design. She uses the modern biopsychosocial framework for FND, the same framework used by leading FND specialty clinics internationally, and works collaboratively with neurologists, rehabilitation physicians, and physiotherapists where those partnerships serve the client. Her post-concussion work integrates CBT for persistent post-concussive symptoms with active-rehabilitation coordination, addressing the mood, anxiety, and cognitive pieces that sustain the syndrome long after the acute injury has healed.
Chronic Pain and Chronic Health Conditions. Chronic pain reshapes identity, relationships, and daily life. Elena's approach integrates pain neuroscience education with psychological strategies that reduce suffering and improve function, even when the underlying condition isn't fully treatable. Clients often arrive believing that if the pain can't be cured, therapy can't help. Elena's work usually shows them otherwise.
Insomnia and Sleep. Using evidence-based CBT-I, Elena addresses the cognitive and behavioural patterns that perpetuate poor sleep. CBT-I is the current first-line treatment for chronic insomnia, outperforming medication in the long term, and Elena is one of a small number of Toronto clinicians who deliver the protocol rigorously.
Anxiety, OCD, Panic, and PTSD. Elena works with the anxiety-spectrum conditions using CBT, exposure-based approaches where appropriate, and, increasingly, somatic and nervous-system regulation techniques that acknowledge how much anxiety lives in the body, not just in the thinking mind.
What a First Session Looks Like
Sessions with Elena tend to be structured but conversational. In your first session, she'll want to understand the story that brought you to therapy, not the CV of your symptoms, but the actual arc: what's been going on, what you've already tried, what you're hoping might be different by the end of this work. She'll ask about medical history and current stressors, and she'll usually offer some initial framing of what she thinks is going on and why. You'll leave the first session with a working sense of the plan, not a vague "let's see how it goes."
Elena is direct without being blunt. She'll tell you when she thinks something is a good fit for treatment and when she thinks you'd be better served by a different clinician or intervention. She won't overpromise. She also won't underpromise. Most of the conditions she works with have real, evidence-based treatments with meaningful effect sizes, and she'll be clear about what's realistic.
Training and Background
Elena completed her graduate studies at the University of Toronto, where she developed expertise in neuroplasticity, learning, and the neuroscience of stress and recovery. She holds both a research doctorate (Ph.D.) and a professional graduate degree in psychotherapy (M.A.), an unusually broad academic foundation for a clinical practice, and one that lets her move fluently between the research literature and the therapy room.
She is a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario and a member in good standing of the College of Registered Psychotherapists of Ontario (CRPO). She continues to engage with the current research in her areas of specialty, and much of the clinic's article library, authored by Elena, reflects the same commitment to grounding practice in evidence.
Working with Elena
Elena sees adults across Ontario, both in person at the clinic's Yonge Street location in North York and via secure video. She offers a complimentary 15-minute consultation to every new client, an unhurried conversation to discuss what you're navigating, ask questions about her approach, and determine together whether working with her is the right next step.
