Free Psych Sessions Are Great, Until You Need More Than Ten

Saw a post doing the rounds on r/AussieFrugal this week, someone sharing a genuinely useful tip: how to get ten bulk billed telehealth psychologist sessions a year through a Mental Health Care Plan. Get the plan from a bulk billing GP, send it to one of a handful of online services, and you’ve got six sessions, then four more after a quick GP check-in. No gap fee. Decent engagement, the comments doing what Reddit comments do, some genuinely helpful, some arguing about whether “bulk billed” means what everyone thinks it means. It does. Twelve people confirmed it in slightly different tones of exasperation.

It’s a good tip. I mean that. If you’re a bit anxious, going through a rough patch, need somewhere to unpack things with a professional and can’t stomach the $100-plus gap fee most psychologists charge, this is real money saved and real help accessed. The kind of thing that should be shared more, not less. Someone in the comments pointed to the Medicare Mental Health Centres too, fully free, no GP plan needed, which is an even better deal if you can get in. Worth bookmarking regardless of which state you’re in.

Except, if you’re in Victoria, you mostly can’t. One commenter pointed out there’s a single Medicare Mental Health Centre type service for the entire Melbourne CBD and inner suburbs, in Fitzroy, under the name Head to Health. One. For a city of five million people. Everywhere else in the country gets a proper network; Victoria got a pilot program that never quite grew up. Nobody in the thread had a good explanation for why, and I don’t either. It’s the sort of bureaucratic orphan that happens when state and federal health systems don’t talk to each other properly, and the people who fall through the gap are, as always, the ones who can least afford to.

And then there was the comment that stuck with me the longest, from someone managing complex PTSD and a schizoaffective disorder. Their line was something like: this is great if your mental health problems are simple and manageable already, and does basically nothing if you need more than basic care. They get one psychiatrist assessment a year, no ongoing bulk billed support, and can’t afford the out of pocket rate for anyone who could actually help with something that complicated. That’s not a failure of the Reddit post, or the GP, or the telehealth services. It’s a system that was built for the median problem, and the people with the most serious problems are, almost by design, outside the median.

I think about this a bit because of a mate who went through something similar a few years back, cycling through GPs trying to get a mental health plan renewed every six months like it was a Centrelink appointment, while actually needing something closer to ongoing specialist care. He had the patience for it, mostly because he had a stable job and a partner keeping things together at home. Plenty of people don’t have either of those buffers. The gap between “the system technically provides this” and “a person can actually access this” is enormous, and it’s exactly where people slip through.

None of this is an argument against sharing the tip. Ten free sessions genuinely changes things for a lot of people, and being tight with money while still looking after your head is not a contradiction, it’s just sensible. But it’s worth holding both things at once: this is a good, practical bit of advice, and it’s also a symptom of a mental health system that’s patched together with online bulk billing services and GP loopholes rather than built properly from the ground up. We had twenty sessions during Covid for a while. Someone in the thread said it was life changing, almost one a fortnight. Then it went back to ten, because apparently a global pandemic was the only thing that made the extra funding politically possible.

If you need help, use the tip. The links are out there, MeHelp, Goodminds, Access Online, and they’re real and free and worth your time. But if you’re the sort of person who votes with half an eye on health policy, it’s also worth remembering that “ten free sessions” is a patch, not a cure, and the people who need the most care are often the ones the patch doesn’t reach.