The first step is to visit a General Practitioner (GP) and ask for a long appointment. If clinically appropriate, the GP may provide a Mental Health Treatment Plan.
When updating this article, this plan provides up to 10 individual consultation sessions with professionals (including but not limited to) a psychologist per calendar year. It also includes up to 10 group consultations per calendar year.
After 6 appointments, the psychologist will write to your GP for purposes of a review of your Mental Health Treatment, asking for up more.
After the initial 10 sessions have been completed, your psychologist may write to your GP again for another review. You will be entitled to use the final 10 sessions if deemed clinically appropriate.
It is important to note that these sessions are per calendar year.
For example, if a person initiates a Mental Health Treatment Plan in late August, weekly sessions could occur until the end of the year. At this point, the person would be entitled to have another 10 sessions under the next calendar year. However, if they continued weekly sessions the next year, they would run out sometime in May, leaving them with no subsidised sessions for the rest of the year.
It is helpful to work with your practitioners to appropriately plan your treatment so that examples like the above do not occur. Of course, this is one example, and many clients may only require a short-term course of treatment.
Considering your own circumstances and collaboratively working with your practitioners to plan your treatment and spacing between sessions is quite productive.
The subsidised sessions through a Mental Health Treatment Plan are part of the Australian Government’s Better Access Initiative, which you can read more about here.