The Australian
Young women will bear the brunt of the federal government’s decision to halve the number of subsidised psychology sessions, new data says, as experts say the country is on the brink of a mental health epidemic unless drastic changes are made.
More than one-third (395,080) of all subsidised psychology sessions held in the past financial year were requested by women aged under 35, statistics obtained by The Australian reveal.
Men of the same age accessed 142,713 sessions.
The government peeled back the extra subsidised sessions to 10 in December, undoing the former Coalition government’s decision to double them to 20 as a pandemic response measure in August 2020.
Australian Psychological Society president Catriona Davis-McCabe said this decision would have a detrimental effect on the country’s mental health, as many patients need up to 20 sessions to remedy their mental illness.
“We’re talking about patients suffering from chronic depression, anxiety, trauma, PTSD,” she said. “Research shows us that when you have a moderate or complex mental health disorder, you need at least 18-20 sessions to treat it. When we revert to 10 sessions, we can’t treat these people adequately or properly.”
Lockdown-stricken Victorians were most likely to access the subsidised services, with about 340,700 sessions being accessed across the state in June 2021-June 2022. NSW residents attended about 310,300 sessions and Queensland 165,920.
Northern Territory residents accessed just 1970 sessions.
Some 1,014,000 subsidised psychology sessions were attended in total throughout the year.
Since the extra services were revoked, Dr Davis-McCabe said patients were being forced to “ration” their treatment to spread 10 appointments as far as possible.
“If this was actually treated as a health issue, we wouldn’t be rationing it,” she said.
“We wouldn’t ration insulin or chemotherapy. We are now falling behind in the standards of provision of mental healthcare by only providing half the treatment people need.”
The government-commissioned Better Access Review last year recommended the 20 subsidised sessions be maintained and “made available and targeted towards those with complex mental health needs”.
“The government has clearly ignored the recommendations made in their own independent review,” Dr Davis-McCabe said. “We urgently need them to address this and ensure mental healthcare is treated seriously.”
Major workforce shortages have exacerbated the issue, she said.
Despite record demand, the federal government is meeting just 35 per cent of its psychology workforce target, which is the largest workforce shortfall of any mental health profession because of a university funding model that sees universities lose money on every psychology masters student they enrol.
“(The government) does need to look at the psychology training,” Dr Davis-McCabe said. “Universities are turning away thousands of students each year because they can’t afford to run the programs, and this means we just don’t have enough psychologists to see people.”
University of Sunshine Coast clinical psychologist Helen Stallman said the government had been “shortsighted” in revoking the subsidised sessions, and Australians were “still doing it tough”.
“The pandemic caused plenty of psychosocial stressors, things like unemployment, housing and the financial impact of unemployment,” she said. “Those stresses don’t just go away, and the government has now taken away any extra support and treatment for these people.”
She said revoking the extra sessions was “discriminatory” as “it’s not the fortunate or the rich who need help, it’s those who are struggling”.
Men were less likely to seek professional help when it came to their mental health, Ms Stallman said, in explaining the overrepresentation of women: “This is needed in terms of highlighting the need for men to seek help, and come forward without shame.”