Lived Experience Forum

[catgirl]

@Owlunar ...glad you had things turn around for you...i dont know much about aged care and i really hope you will be looked after...i hate to think of any of our senior citizens suffering through lack of funding....*shakes fist at government*
catgirl🐾

[Lemonjuice]

What has happened to psych services is disgraceful. It use to be that you could see a psychiatrist of your choice as much as your therapist thought you needed to. If you wanted CBT or short term psychotherapy, you could have that but if you needed long term psychodynamic or psychoanalytic therapy you could have that for free under Medicare.

That is until Howard won the elections...1980s...if memory serves. Wooldridge took over the health portfolio. Together they dismantled free healthcare and mental health services. Wooldridge lifted the cap that psychiatrists could charge and then tried to limit sessions to a few a year. His famous claim was that he couldn't see a reason why mental health patients needed any more visits than someone with a broken leg. I was one of the people that took him to human rights commission. We were able to get him to flip at least to 50 visits a year.

Since then, CBT, short term treatments took over due partly because universities had a fixation on behaviourist-medical model. It's not a bad treatment but in some cases it's about as useful as a couple of panadols to treat cancer.

So, now we have a system where the number of crisis centres have expanded which is great if you need emergency help or to convinced to not harm yourself, hospitals no longer really treat people, but are simplly holding pens, gps aren't able to treat people except through drugs, psychologists can't see anyone for more than a few sessions and only have a small range off tools to apply to mental health issues, psychiatrists can pick and choose and they choose easier cases and charge high prices...so basically, only the rich can see them. Yep, our taxes are helping the well off to get treatment rather than first come no matter the economic situation of the person. It is a disgrace and has been for thirty years across both political parties because Labor could have fixed this but didn't.

Guess what my PhD topic might be?