It’s Mental Health Month, which in Australia means October, and World Mental Health Day fell on the 10th. Mental Health Australia went with “Together We Thrive” as this year’s theme, and I genuinely like it. But anyone who’s tried to get in to see someone about their own mental health knows there can be months (and a fair chunk of money) between being told to “reach out” and actually sitting down in somebody’s office.
So here’s my short answer. A lot of Australians are struggling, and the people we usually send them to (mostly psychologists) are booked out and expensive. Properly trained counsellors are one of the few groups who could take real pressure off that queue, if we had more of them and made them easier to find and afford.
How many of us are actually struggling?
Probably more than you’d guess. The big ABS survey on this, the ABS National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, ran from 2020 to 2022 and found 42.9% of Australians aged 16 to 85 had dealt with a mental disorder at some stage of their lives, which works out to around 8.5 million of us. About one in five (21.5%, or 4.3 million) had been through one in the year before they were asked, and anxiety came out as the most common.
And this is what gets me. Over that same year, only 17.4% of people in that age range saw any kind of health professional about their mental health. I know it’s not apples with apples, since loads of people lean on family or friends or just tough it out, but it does make you wonder how many people who’d benefit from help simply aren’t getting it.
So why can’t people just get in to see someone?
Two things come up again and again, waiting and money. When the Australian Psychological Society polled its members in July 2024, 31% said they couldn’t take on new clients, and about half (49%) said their waitlists ran two to four months, with another 18% reporting waits of five months or longer. If you’ve only just worked up the courage to ask, five months is a long time to sit with it.
Money’s the other big one. In the ABS Patient Experiences survey for 2024-25, about one in four people (25.3%) who needed a psychologist either delayed going or didn’t go at all because of what it’d cost, and among everyone who needed to see someone for their mental health, around a third put it off or missed out at least once. Medicare’s Better Access scheme helps, sure. Once your GP signs off, you can get up to 10 individual sessions a year with a psychologist, an eligible social worker or an occupational therapist, but the gap between the rebate and the fee still bites, especially if you’re on a pension.
Counsellor or psychologist, what’s the difference?
There’s more overlap than most people realise, to be honest. You can sit down with either and talk through whatever’s going on, whether it’s grief after losing your husband or wife, a marriage that’s wobbling, or that harder to pin down feeling of being stuck or lonely. A good counsellor will help you untangle it and figure out a next step, and they’ll know when you’d be better off seeing someone else.
Where they really differ is how they’re trained and regulated. Psychologists have to be registered with AHPRA, the national regulator for health practitioners, and Medicare covers them. Counsellors and psychotherapists don’t come under AHPRA at all, so the profession keeps its own house in order through two peak bodies, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA) and the Australian Counselling Association (ACA), who between them set up the Australian Register of Counsellors and Psychotherapists.
Can anyone call themselves a counsellor?
In most of Australia, yes. PACFA has been pushing for legal protection of the title, because right now someone with no training at all can put “counsellor” on a business card and nothing stops them. As PACFA’s CEO Johanna de Wever put it, “When a high-trust profession has no protected title and no mandated qualifications, the public is exposed.”
So do a little homework before you book. Both PACFA (“Find a Therapist”) and the ACA (“Find a Counsellor”) have search tools on their websites, and don’t feel awkward asking a counsellor about their qualification, supervision and insurance. PACFA-registered practitioners, for example, have to meet a tertiary qualification standard, keep up professional development and supervision, and follow a code of ethics with a formal complaints process behind it. A properly qualified counsellor won’t mind you asking.
Why doesn’t Medicare cover counsellors?
Short version, the rules were built around other professions and haven’t caught up. The ACA says plainly that its registered counsellors aren’t eligible to provide Medicare-rebated services, and the peak bodies have been campaigning for a long while to change that. Even Knox City Council, out in Melbourne’s east, wrote to the Prime Minister in May 2026 asking for registered counsellors and psychotherapists to become eligible Medicare providers, but as far as I can tell nothing has changed yet for private practice.
One newer option is worth knowing about if cost is holding you back. The federal government’s Medicare Mental Health Check In is a free telehealth service for anyone 16 and over, with no referral or diagnosis needed, offering guided low-intensity therapy for people who feel down, stressed or overwhelmed. You can ring Medicare Mental Health on 1800 595 212 on weekdays to see whether it suits you. It’s not the same as a regular counsellor, but it’s a start.
So why does Australia need more qualified counsellors?
Because the maths doesn’t work otherwise. We’ve got millions of people dealing with anxiety or depression and a psychology workforce that can’t stretch far enough to see them all quickly or cheaply, while trained counsellors could be seeing a good chunk of them (a lot of what brings people to counselling isn’t an illness at all, it’s just life being hard for a while).
The catch is the word “qualified”. If we want people to trust counsellors, and we want governments to fund them one day, the profession needs more practitioners with accredited training and supervised experience behind them. That’s why I’m glad there are more ways into the field for people already juggling work and family, like a master of counselling online through the University of Melbourne, which runs part-time and is accredited by the ACA. Courses like that are how we end up with counsellors you’d feel confident sending your mum or your oldest friend to.
And if this month has you thinking about your own wellbeing, or someone else’s, I’d say make the call even if the first person you try is booked out. The right one is usually out there. It just takes a bit of looking.
