Changes to SANE's Support Line

[RachSANECEO]

Dear Forum Community Members

I’ve heard your concerns in the Forums about recent changes to SANE’s 1800 Support Line, and I want to take a moment to acknowledge them and explain what’s happening.

Firstly, I’d like to sincerely apologise to those who’ve been affected. I recognise that the way these changes were communicated didn’t meet your expectations — and for that, I am sorry.

Some important changes have taken effect recently, and I want to provide some context and invite questions or feedback on this thread.

What’s Changing and Why

• SANE’s services are evolving in line with our funding, as we prepare to open the Guided Recovery program to all postcode regions later in 2025
• We are developing strategies to improve how we scale, reach people, and manage growing demand for individual counselling and peer support
• As of 26 April 2025, SANE is no longer offering single-session counselling via ad hoc calls to our 1800 Support Line
• The SANE Support Line is available Monday to Friday, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm (AEST), via phone call to 1800 187 263 and webchat at sane.org
• It is staffed by trained Mental Health Support Workers who can:
  • Talk with you about your needs and help explore your concerns
  • Support you to decide whether SANE Forums, Guided Recovery counselling, peer support or groups are right for you
  • Provide information and referrals to other services where helpful
• Our Support Workers also operate the Webchat service (Monday–Friday, 10:00 am – 8:00 pm AEST)

What’s Available

• Individual counselling and peer support continue to be available through our Guided Recovery program, which will expand to all postcode regions by late 2025
• If you’re a current SANE Forums or Support Line user and these changes have affected you, we’re offering access to additional support — please contact teamforums@sane.org to request this
• We also welcome your feedback on the timing or communication of these changes via feedback@sane.org or through our Feedback & Complaints Policy form

Expanding Guided Recovery

We are proud of the outcomes of our Guided Recovery program, which offers structured support through individual counselling, peer support, recovery planning, and groups. A key strength of the model is that we collect information — with consent — to support follow-up and tailored care.

Thanks to recent funding confirmation, we’re pleased to share that the Guided Recovery and Forums programs have secured three years of investment. This will allow us to remove postcode restrictions and offer Guided Recovery nationwide.

Currently, Guided Recovery is available to people aged 18+ in around half of the 31 Primary Health Network (PHN) regions across Australia. With this new funding, we’ve received approval to expand — but we must do so within the available funding envelope. That means we are undertaking careful service design work over the next 3–6 months to manage this transition responsibly and sustainably.

This work includes:

• Designing service pathways that match our proven models of care
• Managing access and demand to ensure high-quality, safe, and timely support
• Continuing to prioritise individual counselling and peer support within a structured and scalable framework

We remain deeply committed to providing individual counselling — including single-session support — but we must do so in ways that are safe, effective, and sustainable. We are focusing on making more of the benefits of the Guided Recovery model — including recovery planning, groups, and access to digital resources — available to more people, including members of this Forums community.

If You’ve Been Affected

If you’re an existing member of the Forums community who has also accessed counselling via the Support Line and are affected by this change, we are offering you access to additional support.

To seek more information or access this, please email the Forums team at team@saneforums.org and they will support you through the process.

Please note that, under SANE’s model of care, participants in Guided Recovery will need to provide contact information. This is essential to ensure the safe, effective, and responsive delivery of individual support.

Thank you for your understanding and for your continued contributions to our community. We are committed to evolving our services with care and in partnership with you.

Best wishes,

Rachel Green
SANE CEO

@Bow @Till23 @tyme @ElephantEar3 

[Bow]

This has all been so poorly managed and communicated @RachSANECEO 

I think the ‘support line’ needs a new name. Cause it is now nothing like what it was, same with the web chat. It is more of an info and referral service. 

I connected to the web chat some months ago when I was informed that ‘web chat’ was ‘back up and running’. I connected wanting to chat about what had happened early in my day that was upsetting me. This is what I would connect and do with the old web chat. But on this day I was rudely informed that that is not what ‘web chat’ was for. And I was told to seek support elsewhere. this was an info and referral service. 

I think a lot of forums members are really disappointed in the lack of transparency in all of this and how all these changes have been communicated. For some, the support line and the old web chat were an important part of their support plan, which has frequently been communicated here on the forums via various feedback options. And some, including myself, have felt like we have been strung along with false hope that both would remain. 

transparency and communication would be really appreciated going forward. 

[RachSANECEO]

thanks for your reply @Bow and once again I'm sorry for the experience of how things have changed.

We are working towards a future vision where much more support is available to you via one community platform - we are working to design for this in a way that is faster and easier for you to access and offers more features but its a big piece of design and modelling which takes time for our team which is still fairly small.

I have asked our Recovery Community team to come up with a plan for how we can engage more regularly with you on design and service evolution.

[Jlol]

Thank you for sharing this information @RachSANECEO.

Please don't take the following as over-criticism of SANE. I'm just taking the opportunity to talk about these particular issues, in this relevant thread.

You wrote:

Please note that, under SANE’s model of care, participants in Guided Recovery will need to provide contact information. This is essential to ensure the safe, effective, and responsive delivery of individual support.

But you don't give an reasoning or justification as to why. Previously, the SANE support line allowed you to call on a private number but also, if you wanted to, create an account, with an anonymous name, that you could tell the counsellor about so they could record your information against.

Why does SANE need our private information now when it didn't before?

A few days ago I wrote a post about how choosing anonymity was important to some callers because of the possibility of over reactions by staff, and how they could feel they need to 'activate' their duty of care and call emergency services. I went on to detail about how in some states, like Queensland, calling emergency services for a mental health case results in a police call out and often abuse, both verbal and physical. Obviously, this will be very detrimental to someone who is already in a rough place.

Allowing users a layer of privacy and anonymity helps them feel safe and able to call support services, like SANE, and not worry about possible retaliation for doing so.

We can go on about how the behaviours of police are irresponsible, shouldn't be happening, and could even possibly be illegal, but the fact of the matter is neither SANE or its callers can do anything about it. Sadly, this is an element that is beyond our control. The best SANE can do is work around this problem and allow callers to access mental health support safely, without the risk of being abused or hurt. I am wondering if this issue discussed when making the decision to block private numbers from calling SANE? And if it was, why this decision was made?

I guess a follow on question is why does SANE need private information? As I said before, there was already a system in place to identify users with an anonymous ID and link information about them to that.

SANE can and should collect data on its users for research and improving it services, but this should be anonymous and not attached to any individuals. This is already how many NGOs operate.

In this respect does SANE only collect information relevant to contacting the individuals to provide the service (eg phone number, email address)?

Lastly, I understand that it may be that storing callers' information is a requisite for government funding. Is this true? And if it is, could you tell us why?

Many thanks, and keep up the otherwise fantastic work
Jlol

[RachSANECEO]

These are great questions @Jlol and I'm going to do a quick reply now and maybe a longer one later (because I'm about to board a plane).

We want to have contact information so we can call you back is the very simple version.

We have trialled and learned that our ability to offer continuity - getting to know you and support you and reach out to you - has a lot of benefit.

In a fully anonymous model - for example the way it works at lifeline a service collects no name, no contact details. That's not how we have found our work to be valuable here - not having ongoing contact with people limits our ability to do deeper psychosocial work over time, and complex mental health is often a longer term issue. The evidence also shows that for people with complex mental health needs - short term services and interventions aren't effective.

But i also acknowledge the fear that many many consumers have that if they mention suicidal thinking they will immediately get a knock on the door.

We are planning to begin some codesign around what we can do differently that supports people to build and maintain their own safety - in my view there is a lot that needs improvement across the system in this space. too often feeling suicidal is either an immediate escalation or exclusion criteria. i think there is a middle ground particularly for people who live with a level of chronic, ongoing suicidality. they need places to talk about that and work through it without being 'escalated' every time they mention it. i believe we can design that together with you.

the other factor is about protecting the safety and wellbeing of our staff.

we do get abusive contacts to our service from time to time, its not a large part of the contacts we receive but its persistent and we need to protect our staff so they are safe - especially because so many of them have lived experience themselves.

so there's a trade off.

we want to always offer the community to connect with each other here where you are anonymous to each other - but a lot of the evidence we are seeing is that us knowing more about you and you feeling known, not having to re-tell your story, our community builders understanding your needs and being able to help coach and support and remind you of your strengths and goals - has enormous value. its the opposite to a system where people often present to a service and feel completely unseen (even though they might actually be sharing a ton more medical and personal info).

hope this is enough context on how we are thinking about things - i did see a thread that @Till23 tagged me in about needing more 'semi-private spaces' to be able to talk about the impacts of CSA in a way that perhaps isnt read publicly. we do have to limit the graphic trauma disclosures that are shared because they impact other members and our staff but we can also design for spaces and groups with different levels of visibility and membership. I'm eager to keep the two way conversations and design going about these ideas and would love you to share more in the codesign hub (if perhaps one of the mods can share a link to join it) @ElephantEar3

thanks again for replying to me.

[ElephantEar3]

Great idea @RachSANECEO 

See Co-design Hub here - Forums co-design group hub - SANE Forums

@Jlol - feel free to start a thread or request that one of us do. Would love to get the conversations going

[Bow]

These semi private/ group spaces were discussed in the original co design and my understanding was that it was trialled with some… or at least a forums member? But it was decided that it would not work?

[RachSANECEO]

definitely not out of scope. i think there's def value in you being able to use a mix of talking in spaces like this to the whole community, and talking in a space thats just private to you and the Community Builder teams. We went down a path of trying to build versions in here and trying to build versions in our portal but neither quite do it - the future will be one environment where we can build it how we want.

For a very rough sense of time, we have a major tech piece of work to do over the rest of this year - sort of foundational platform stuff, it wont affect forums so you wont see it unless you're checking out our guided program but it has to be done first before we can design all the cool stuff we are thinking about.

[DogMan79]

What alternate support lines are available for complex cases?

Lifeline counsellors just Actively Listen. Which is a skill used in child care, and even the 3 year olds I worked with  were too smart for having what they say repeated back to them

[RachSANECEO]

Hi @DogMan79 thanks for the question - to be clear we are still the service offering free counselling and peer support through our guided recovefy program and through the ongoing service development work we are doing behind the scenes our goal is to offer single session support - its just that it will be through a different mechanism (booked - including booking in real time (imagine looking at availability and booking someone up to an hour before or something similar), with the ability to follow up and provide ongoing support using forums) rather than trying to maintain a model that is very difficult to deliver effectively as an open call support service. Hope that helps?