Who Can Actually Diagnose and Prescribe? A Guide to Mental Health Credentials in Canada

Physician review recommended before publishing - verify scope-of-practice claims against current provincial regulation.

"Mental health professional" is an umbrella term covering roles with very different training, regulation, and legal authority. If you're buying a workplace mental health program, knowing who can do what is the difference between a benefit that treats illness and one that only talks about it.

Psychiatrists

Medical doctors (MD) with specialized residency training in psychiatry. They diagnose mental illness, prescribe and manage medication, order investigations, and treat the full range of conditions including severe and complex ones. Highest level of medical authority in mental health.

Family physicians / GPs

Also MDs. They diagnose and treat common mental health conditions, prescribe medication, and manage many cases without a specialist - referring to psychiatry for complexity. In practice, family physicians deliver most of Canada's frontline mental health care.

Psychologists

Doctoral- or master's-level regulated professionals who assess, diagnose (in most provinces), and deliver psychotherapy. Critically, in most Canadian provinces psychologists cannot prescribe medication.

Counsellors, social workers, psychotherapists

Regulated to varying degrees by province. They provide counselling and therapy, support and skills-building. They do not prescribe and generally do not make medical diagnoses.

Coaches

Unregulated. No standardized training requirement, no diagnostic or prescribing authority.

The takeaway

Only physicians - family doctors and psychiatrists - can diagnose a medical condition and prescribe. If your workplace program has no physician layer, it structurally cannot deliver medical care, no matter how many "mental health professionals" it lists. That's the single most useful question to ask a vendor: who on your team can diagnose and prescribe?

CorpCARE is built on the physician and psychiatrist layer - the only credentials that can diagnose and treat, not just support.

Sources

1. Canadian Psychological Association. "Task Force on Prescriptive Authority for Psychologists in Canada: Final Report." https://cpa.ca/docs/File/Task_Forces/CPA_RxPTaskForce_FinalReport_Dec2010_RevJ17.pdf
2. "Prescriptive authority for psychologists and scope of practice: A national survey of Canadian psychologists and psychology students." Canadian Psychology, 2025. https://doi.org/10.1037/cap0000404