2024-01-31 18:04:50
Consultations with a psychologist could soon cost less for the French. Faced with an explosion of mental health problems, Gabriel Attal promised on Tuesday to “increase the price of reimbursed consultations” with the “psychiatrist” to “limit as much as possible the remaining costs for young patients and their families”.
Today and since spring 2022, people over the age of three suffering from psychological problems of “mild to moderate intensity” can benefit from 8 sessions with the psychologist, partly reimbursed by Health Insurance. After having obtained the green light from their doctor and on condition of contacting a professional referenced by Social Security.
Direct access
Called “My psych support” or “My Psych journey”, this system “started from a good intention but it did not give the expected results”, estimated the Prime Minister, during his general policy declaration to the Meeting Tuesday. Hence the executive’s promise to renovate it “from top to bottom”.
“To remove all the obstacles, we will also allow young people to have direct access to a psychologist without going through a doctor,” launched Gabriel Attal. When questioned, the government indicates that these new support arrangements should only concern pupils and students. He doesn’t provide much more detail at the moment.
These announcements were well received by interested professionals. “We welcome this awareness of the inadequacy of My psychological support,” reacted the National Union of Psychologists (SNP). “The system does not work, we had indicated this from the start,” adds Jérôme Maillé of the SNP.
Some 145,000 French people had benefited from the system in May, a little over a year after its launch, according to Health Insurance. However, only a little over 2,300 psychologists participated in the system on that date, out of a population of some 27,000 professionals working in private practice, according to the SNP. Enough to limit access to reimbursed consultations.
Not financially attractive enough
“The system is not sufficiently financially attractive for psychologists,” denounced deputies from the Social Affairs Committee in June. The price of the consultation imposed by Social Security is 40 euros for the first session and 30 euros for subsequent sessions (60% of which is reimbursed by Social Security). However, the average price of a classic consultation would be between 50 and 70 euros today.
Result: to provide their patients with reimbursement, psychologists would have to lower their prices. And to increase the number of consultations to find your way financially. “We cannot, if we want to do quality work, receive a very large number of patients in a working day,” warns Jérôme Maillé of the SNP.
Still “pending”, he welcomes the fact that it would no longer be obligatory to go through a doctor. An approach which, according to the union, dissuades people in pain from trying to obtain reimbursed consultations. “If there is no coordination [entre le psychologue et le médecin] this can be nonsense and detrimental to the patient himself,” specifies Jean-Marcel Mourgues, vice-president of the National Council of the Order of Physicians.
One observation is in any case consensual: mental health disorders among the French, particularly the youngest, are very significant since the Covid crisis, but the mental health sector is in crisis, against a backdrop of lack of professionals. Hence the importance for the psychologists’ union to launch a “more global reflection covering the entire psychological care system”.
Medical-psychological centers, public structures supposed to be key to the management of psychological problems “have been saturated for too many years, you have to wait several months, or even more than a year, for a first appointment,” warned the deputies specializing in social affairs in June. “My psychological journey cannot remain the tree that hides the largely devastated forest that constitutes the public mental health system,” they concluded.
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