Counselling is an allied health support that can improve the quality of life for both those living with a disability and their family members. For families of children with a disability, it’s not widely known that counselling can be accessed through your child’s NDIS plan and that counselling is not limited to your child if counselling for family members will improve your child’s overall emotional health and wellbeing.

Counselling can guide your child and family members to develop different techniques and skills to strengthen mental health and achieve individualised goals. 

Benefits of Counselling

Counselling can support and benefit the person with disability and their family members who are their support network and whose mental health and wellbeing is also so important. If you receive counselling, your Counsellor will work with you on what you want to achieve. Some of ways that our Counsellor might help both children and young people with disability and their families include:

• Guidance through life transitions and/or difficult periods
• Supporting healthy family relationships
• Strategies to cope with anxiety, depression or feelings of overwhelm
• Building skills and capacity to cope with the impact of disability
• Supporting individuals and families through grief and loss

Funding for Counselling

Counselling is a capacity-building support and to access counselling services under the NDIS, your child must have “Improved Daily Living” included in their plan. Improved Daily Living provides funds that you can use for support from allied health professionals, including from a Counsellor. Generally, Improved Daily Living funding is flexible so you can choose how to use this across the range of allied health supports that your child needs to help them reach their goals.

You will need to show that counselling will support your child to meet their goals, in the same way as other allied health supports such as occupational therapy or speech therapy. If there is not a suitable goal in your child’s current plan, and you think that counselling would help you can ask for a plan review to adjust the goals in your child’s plan. A suitable goal would be based around the emotional health and wellbeing of your child.

A word from our Counsellor

"Hi, I’m Maylene and I am a Counsellor at Xavier. I have worked in the disability area as a Counsellor for 7 years. Many families are unaware that counselling can be accessed through the NDIS. I currently work with children, teenagers, adults, parents and carers who live with disability in their lives. I practice Family Therapy and assist clients and family members to build resilience, acceptance, maintain positive relationships and assist with behaviour management, school refusal and all mental health diagnoses."

Further information

To find out more about our Counselling service, call 1800 XAVIER or fill in our simple enquiry form and we’ll be in touch.