One million psychology appointments could be lost to subsidy cuts

Since October 2020, Australians have been able to access 20 government-subsidised psychologist appointments through a mental health treatment plan, raised from ten to cope with worsening mental health during COVID.

The additional ten annual appointments are set to expire on December 31, meaning without a subsidy, clients who need more than ten sessions will be forced to pay an extra $80-$100 each time.

For young people like Emma*, a 22-year-old who studies full-time, paying for her psychologist herself without the subsidy would be near-impossible.

Her appointments cost $120 each, with an $88 government subsidy, and while she now has financial help from her family, she used to have to choose between paying her rent and receiving mental health care.

"If I was covering the cost myself, especially as a full-time student, I wouldn't be able to sustain it," she said.

"Anything that negates someone's access to a health service is cruel, and a financial boundary is a huge boundary for access," she said.

Australian Psychological Society President Tamara Cavenett said 10 sessions is simply not enough to help people struggling with their mental health.

"We know that people don't require just ten sessions to recover," she said.

"These twenty sessions have allowed us to see people based on their clinical need."

The additional ten annual sessions have been extraordinarily successful, Ms Cavenett said, with 1,023,241 more sessions provided by psychologists in the 2021-22 financial year alone.

"There will be a million services we will no longer be able to provide," she said.

"Nowhere else in medicine would you ever see us giving people half of what is required for recovery."

Read more:

Psychologist Nivedita Malik said the subsidy cuts would be a major step backwards for mental health care in Australia, when more people than ever are seeking mental health support.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, more than two in five Australians will experience a mental health issue at some point in their life.

"Since COVID, the mental health needs have changed - the amount of referrals I'm getting is massive," Ms Malik said.

"People are desperate to access psychological therapies."

Cutting the subsidies will "collapse the whole system", she said, forcing clients into emergency rooms that are already buckling under demand.

"These people need more than ten sessions," Ms Malik said.

"If they go back to the GPs, they can't do anything - they would say go see the psychologist, and that would increase their risk of harm."

"They would end up in the emergency department, and that would be detrimental for the whole health care system."

NSW's Illawarra Women's Health Centre executive director Sally Stevenson AM said cutting subsidies would ignore the growing need for mental health support.

"It's not recognising that we know mental health rates are increasing, particularly for women during COVID," Ms Stevenson said.

The Women's Health Centre is one of a small number of community services that provide free mental health support in the Illawarra.

If the rebates are removed, Ms Stevenson said, their service will be inundated with demand they don't have the resources to support.

"It's very short-term thinking," she said.

"Cutting support will undermine long-term health outcomes and will ultimately cost the health system more, including acute presentations at hospitals, which even now have no capacity to manage demand."

Mental health advocates hope to hear an extension of subsidies from the government by the end of the year.