Children’s mental healthcare in Canada is undergoing a transition: instead of community- and hospital-based services working in parallel, there is a shift to increasing collaboration. When community- and hospital-based children’s mental health service providers work together, differences in their philosophical approaches to treatment can be revealed. However, client experiences of these philosophical differences have not been explored. In this hermeneutic phenomenological study, I interviewed young people and their families who had lived experience of collaboration in a mid-sized Canadian city. I considered the results of these interviews with families who were new to treatment that was shared between hospital- and community-based services in light of literature on current initiatives in collaborative mental health care. I situated my results in the context of my on-going work as a service provider in this Canadian city alongside the reflections of service providers from the two organizations that were the focus of my research: the Children's Hospital and the Community Agency. I found that young people and their parents experience their care as being in a constant state of crisis when connections between these services are not explicit. In contrast, when connections are clear, families feel more able to manage their children’s care. As well, service providers find that when explicit connections are forged between community-and hospital-based services, collaboration becomes more straightforward and is experienced as less hierarchical. The results of my research provide concrete tools, contextualized in the real worlds of current practitioners and clients, to help the future psychotherapists of Ontario work collaboratively towards supporting young people and their families who seek treatment for mental health diagnoses.