Australia

As Australia is vulnerable to the effects of climate change, there has been interest to develop community counselling strategies that would be inclusive to deal with the after effects of natural disasters such as fires, droughts, and floods (Young, 2011 as cited in Schofield, 2013a). The 2020 bushfires pushed a rise in mental health responses for those affected by its aftermath from providing trauma counsellors for children to providing ten free counselling sessions for individuals, families, and emergency service workers who were affected. 

A recent study by Davis-McCabe et al. (2019), on the challenges of being a counsellor in Australia, highlighted multiple issues such as the discrepancies between counselling identities, “inequalities in rebate schemes between clinical and counselling psychologists” (David-McCabe et al., 2019, p. 521), and power imbalances due to biases toward clinical psychology. According to the counsellors in the study, the Better Access initiative established by the Australian government to strengthen access and capacity of the mental health system, has actually continued to spread information with bias towards pushing potential consumers towards clinical psychologists, holding them as the best choice when treating mental health issues over other types of mental health professionals (Davis-McCabe et al., 2019). The study indicates “The Medicare top-tier allows clinical psychologists to provide ‘psychological therapy,’ while the second-tier only allows counselling psychologists to offer ‘focused psychological strategies’” (Davis-McCabe et al., 2019, p. 522). This statement was viewed negatively as the split clearly showed the ingrained biases held towards clinical psychologists versus counsellors.