Lived Experience Forum

[espressologic]

NEW Mental Health Recovery Webinar Series!
🗓️ First Webinar: 26 June, 7-8pm (AEST)
👩‍⚕️ Featuring: A/Prof Caroline Johnson, GP, Researcher, and Educator

Gain expert insights on:

• How to set up your first/next session to get the most out of your GP relationship.
• The holistic nature of general practice.
• The link between physical and mental health.
• The behind-the-scenes of GP funding.
• Mental health plans and diagnosis.
• Policy initiatives impacting primary mental health care.
• Navigating conversations about medications, side effects, and symptoms.

A/Prof Johnson is a GP with a special interest in primary mental health care. She has extensive experience training GPs and medical students, with a special focus on improving their skills in mental health care. As a researcher at the University of Melbourne, her PhD looked at people’s experience of monitoring depression and she is currently working on ways to improve navigation of the mental health system. She has also held many advocacy roles, working with several relevant organisations including RACGP, Mental Health Australia, Equally Well Alliance, Department of Health and Aged Care and various Primary Health Networks.

[chibam]

Um... My calendar says the 26th is a Wednesday?

[espressologic]

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@chibam wrote:

Um... My calendar says the 26th is a Wednesday?

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Thank you so much... the proof reader (i.e., me) was asleep 😂 - now all fixed.

[chibam]

@espressologic  and others - it looks like I won't be able to attend tonight. ☹️ I'll watch the video when it's uploaded, though.

I wonder if one of you (assuming you see this message in time) could perhaps do me a favor? If there's any free time left at the end of the Q&A, could somebody please ask this doc if the therapy discount scheme from Medicare still requires patients to surrender their doctor-patient privelage?

When I got the discount, years and years ago, I had to sign away my doctor-patient privelage with my GP, and this lead to a lot of problems when my therapist turned out to be terrible, and I could no longer trust that whatever I said to my GP - particularly unfavorable comments about my therapist - was legally guaranteed to remain just between us.

I'd be interested to know if this is still the case.

But please, don't defer your own questions for the sake of mine. And don't worry if you forget, or if you don't catch this message in time. Just if there's any spare time to kiII at the end of the session, I'd be interested in knowing what the state of things is these days.

[espressologic]

Hi @chibam, was just coming on to remind everyone that the webinar is starting in 45 minutes 😁

Sorry you'll miss the live event, will definitely add your question to the list.  We'll try and get the recording up as quickly as possible, but as this is a new thing we're doing it may take us a couple of days to work out the tech side.

[ArraDreaming]

I’m not sure

[chibam]

Thanks, @espressologic !🙂

Sorry I couldn't be there.

[espressologic]

Hi @chibam, we had a lot of questions last night so we didn't ask your question at the live event.  I did raise it with Caroline before we started, though.  She wasn't familiar with the waiver you described, but wondered if you were referring to the clause where you give consent for the GP and psychologist to talk to each other about the referral?  This is fairly standard.  In the event that you didn't click with the therapist and discontinued seeing them, the GP may provide feedback to the therapist on your behalf about why it wasn't a good fit (for the purpose of helping them improve).  If you're not comfortable about such information being disclosed, then it's a good idea to ask questions about how information will be shared and under what circumstances when proceeding with a Mental Health Care Plan.  Hope that helps?  

[chibam]

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@espressologic wrote:

Hi @chibam, we had a lot of questions last night so we didn't ask your question at the live event. 

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That's fine, @espressologic .🙂 If anything, I'm happy for you. It sounds like the event was a roaring success!

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@espressologic wrote:

I did raise it with Caroline before we started, though.  She wasn't familiar with the waiver you described, but wondered if you were referring to the clause where you give consent for the GP and psychologist to talk to each other about the referral?  This is fairly standard. 

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Thank you!

And yes, that's the thing I was talking about. So it sounds like it's still a part of the discount scheme. (I haven't had anything to do with the scheme for well over a decade now.)

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@espressologic wrote:

In the event that you didn't click with the therapist and discontinued seeing them, the GP may provide feedback to the therapist on your behalf about why it wasn't a good fit (for the purpose of helping them improve).

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Maybe that's a bit of an idealized interpretation of a concept that doesn't work out so neatly in reality?

I mean, for one thing, it assumes that the therapist is actually willing to change the way they practice in order to better serve the patient; in which case, I would question why the necessary changes simply couldn't be arranged between the therapist and the patient, directly?

For example, in my case, the problem with my therapist was that she was trying to push an ideology upon me that I didn't agree with. She knew that I didn't believe in that ideology, but all she wanted to do was push it on me. She wasn't interested in improving to become a better therapist for me, because she was deadset committed to treating me the way she wanted to treat me. So I am pretty well convinced that any criticism I voiced against her to my GP would've just been petty and inconsequential.

And for another thing, it presumes that the patient percieves the act of criticizing someone else as an ethical act. And when your someone like me, who has a long history of having other people look down their nose at you saying: "Not good enough... not good enough... not good enough... not good enough...", and you've spent more or less your entire life wishing that people would just stop treating each other like that, it's a bit rough asking someone to start treating their therapist like this, via their GP.

I can imagine that painful histories like mine, and the associated hatred of telling people that they/their work "wasn't good enough", aren't exceedingly rare in the mentally ill community. I've watched numerous "How to do therapy" videos on Youtube, and it's quite common for the presenter to tell viewers that they should tell their therapist that their doing a bad job, and that they shouldn't care about how their therapist feels. Why would this message be so commonplace unless there was a widespread aversion to this behavior amongst the viewership?

That being said, I think that (mostly) these videos underplay the depth of this issue. You can't just make someone comfortable and willing to engage in abhorrent behavior just with a brief statement of: "It's okay, we want you to do this to us." If you know that you would never, ever want someone to do that to you, then your never gonna be able to make your peace with doing it to another human being, even if they are begging for it. It's not something that can be lightly glossed over.

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@espressologic wrote:

If you're not comfortable about such information being disclosed, then it's a good idea to ask questions about how information will be shared and under what circumstances when proceeding with a Mental Health Care Plan.

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Good advice.

But it's probably also worth remembering that when your life's in a mess, and you just want to get it fixed, you may not be "with it" enough to go wading through beaurocratic contracts, or to ask all the pertinent questions that a fully "on-the-ball" person might have the wherewithall to ask.

I know that when I went in to get my discount - and I was fairly young at the time - I wasn't happy to be there, and I just wanted to get out as quickly as I could. I would've agreed to pretty much anything, I think, if it just got that appointment over and done with. I was in no state to ask shrewd quetions about what I was signing up for.

I can imagine that that's a fairly common predicament for users of this scheme, because let's face it, nobody signs up for therapy when their calm and level-headed.

Sorry. Here I am talking your ear off about issues that are beyond your control. I'll shut up now.😉

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@espressologic wrote:

Hope that helps?  

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Yes, thank you. You answered my question completely.🙂

[espressologic]

How to manage the relationship with your psychologist / finding the right psychologist sounds like it could be a good webinar topic perhaps @chibam ?