The NDIS Is Using Mental Health to Reduce Funding

What's changed with psychology funding, how mental health is being used to trim plans, and what to ask your psychologist to focus on.

If you're autistic and on the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), your psych report carries a lot of weight. It's one of the main pieces of evidence a planner reads when deciding what goes in your plan. Right now, what that report says about mental health can make a real difference to how much support you keep. Here is how some planners are choosing to use your personal Psychologist Report to trim your funding.

The NDIS doesn't cover mental health

The NDIS pays for disability support. It doesn't pay for health care, and mental health is treated as health care.

That means help with anxiety, depression or trauma is meant to come through Medicare instead. Your general practitioner (GP) can set up a mental health plan, called Better Access, which gives you some subsidised psychology sessions each year.

If you ask the NDIS to fund mental health support, you'll often get a letter saying it's "the responsibility of the health system." That's the NDIS saying it belongs with Medicare.

The psychology the NDIS does fund

The NDIS will fund psychology that supports you with everyday things that are harder because of your disability. For autistic people, that might be building strategies for sensory overload, social situations or dealing with services. This money comes from the Capacity Building part of your plan, which is for learning skills.

When you joined the NDIS, you were sent an impairment notice. It lists the conditions you were accepted for, and for most autistic people that's autism. Since October 2024, the NDIS only funds support linked to what's on that notice. It's worth checking yours.

Less money for psychology

Plans are getting smaller across the board, and psychology is feeling it:

• The government wants the average plan to drop from about $31,000 to $26,000.

• Unspent money now disappears when your plan ends instead of carrying over.

Meanwhile, the price of a psychology session rose in July 2026, from $232.99 to $252.99 an hour. A higher price inside a smaller plan means fewer sessions. Twenty hours might become fifteen, and some people may not get any.

How mental health is used to reduce plans

The NDIS has savings targets to meet, and the mental health rule has become one of the easiest ways to meet them.

It works like this. A planner reads your psych report. If it talks a lot about feelings, depression, anxiety, OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder), PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder) or C-PTSD (complex post traumatic stress disorder) etc, the planner can decide that a certain share of your difficulties is mental health related.

Because the NDIS doesn't cover mental health, they reduce your plan by that 'imaginary' share.

The more your psychologist report talks about mental health, the more of your plan is at risk.

The same goes for ADHD. If autism is the condition the NDIS accepted you for, it's best to keep ADHD out of the spotlight in your psych report too. We know that doesn't make much sense. You have one brain, and it doesn't split neatly into categories. But right now, that's how reports are being read.

This isn't limited to psychology funding either. It can reduce support worker hours, therapy and other parts of your plan. Participants and advocates are seeing it happen, and some planners appear to be using it to help meet their targets. It isn't fair, and it isn't what the scheme was designed for. Knowing about it means you can be prepared.

What your psych report should focus on

The NDIS looks for what it calls functional capacity. That's a formal way of describing everyday things that are harder for you because of autism, and where you need support. Your report will be strongest when it focuses on these areas:

• Communication: losing words under stress, needing extra time to process, finding phone calls very difficult, and where things break down with doctors, Centrelink or services.

• Social: situations with other people where you need support, like making appointments, sorting out problems or keeping up relationships.

• Work: the barriers that make finding or keeping work harder, like noisy workplaces, unclear instructions, job interviews or shifts that change at short notice.

• Alexithymia: difficulty noticing and naming what's happening in your body and emotions. For example, not noticing hunger and missing meals, or struggling to describe pain to a doctor.

• Sensory: places, sounds, lights and textures that overwhelm you, how long you can manage them, and what that affects, like food shopping, showering or getting to appointments.

• Co-occurring Conditions: If you suffer from Seizures, Tourette's Syndrome or other co-occurring conditions that do not relate to mental health.

For each area, it helps when the report explains how it affects your daily life and how often. "Leaves the supermarket within ten minutes, three or four times a week, so often runs out of food" tells the NDIS far more than "experiences significant distress."

Putting it together

The NDIS is there for support with autism and are strict about not funding the mental health issues that arise from autism or being late diagnosed. Keeping the two separate in your paperwork protects your plan.

Most importantly, talk to your support network about this article. Your support coordinator, psychologist, occupational therapist, speech pathologist, neurologist, family and friends may all have their own insight into the NDIS changes and how reports are being written and read. Share it with them, ask what they're seeing or know and work together to approach this.

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Wired Differently Australia has written this article from experience of seeing this happen within our community.