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A Counselling Concern, 114 Burrowye Crescent, Keilor (2026)

29/08/2026

When a baby is born, the attention goes to the mother. Rightly so — she's recovering from birth, navigating hormonal shifts, and often carrying the primary caregiving load. But the father's experience gets overlooked. Not out of malice. Out of assumption.

The assumption is that dad is fine. Dad is the support. Dad is the one holding everything else together.

But research from the Parent-Infant Research Institute (PIRI) found that 1 in 10 Australian fathers experience depression or anxiety during pregnancy or after the birth of a child. And many of them don't seek help.

The reasons are familiar. Men are socialised to push through. A new dad is supposed to be happy — he has a baby, a family, a new chapter. Admitting that he's struggling, anxious, or flat feels like failing at the one thing he's supposed to get right. There's also the practical reality: between work, sleep deprivation, and a partner who needs support, there's no time to fall apart. So he doesn't. He holds it together. He functions.

PIRI recently launched DadBooster — a free, online program specifically designed for fathers experiencing postnatal depression or anxiety. It's a six-session CBT-based program that dads can do privately, at their own pace. It's an important resource. But online programs work best when they complement, not replace, human support.

Fathers' postnatal depression looks different from what people expect. It's not always sadness. It can be irritability. Withdrawal. Working longer hours to avoid going home. Anger that comes from exhaustion. Numbness toward a baby you expected to feel bonded with instantly. The guilt of not feeling what you're “supposed” to feel. The shame of struggling when your partner is recovering from something far more physically demanding.

These are real experiences. They're common. And they don't make you a bad father or a bad partner.

If you're a new dad and something feels off — not a crisis, just a shift you can't quite name — it's worth talking to someone who isn't your partner, isn't your boss, and isn't your mate who'll tell you to “suck it up.” Counselling is a space where you don't have to perform. Where struggling doesn't mean failing.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

28/08/2026

The Butterfly Foundation and Eating Disorders Alliance have announced the theme for Body Image and Eating Disorders Awareness Week 2026 (September 7-13): “Redefining Wellness — Stories We're Sold About Health and Our Bodies.”

It's a theme that hits a nerve.

The wellness industry is worth billions. It profits from a simple equation: make people feel their bodies aren't good enough, then sell them the solution. Diet products rebranded as “lifestyle.” Calorie trackers disguised as “health apps.” Fitness wearables that turn movement into surveillance. Influencers selling “what I eat in a day” as if a stranger's meal plan is a prescription. Celebrities endorsing detox teas and protein powders with the gravitas of medical advice.

The messaging is everywhere, and it's designed to feel like empowerment. “Wellness” sounds positive. “Self-care” sounds nurturing. But underneath the language, the message hasn't changed in decades: your body is a project. It needs fixing. You need managing. And the managing never ends.

For people vulnerable to body image concerns — and research shows that's most Australians at some point — this messaging doesn't just sell products. It shapes how people relate to themselves. Food becomes numbers on a tracker. Exercise becomes punishment rather than movement. Rest becomes guilt. The body becomes something to monitor rather than live in.

The BIEDAW theme asks a different question: who benefits from you feeling this way? Diet and wellness companies make millions from body dissatisfaction. If you loved your body exactly as it is, what would you need to buy?

This isn't anti-health. Physical health matters. Movement matters. Nourishment matters. But health and the wellness industry are not the same thing. One is about your wellbeing. The other is about your money.

If your relationship with food, exercise, or your body has become a source of stress rather than nourishment, that's worth talking about. Body image concerns don't have to reach the level of an eating disorder to be taken seriously. The earlier the conversation starts, the less entrenched the patterns become.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

28/08/2026

Anger has a reputation problem. It's the emotion people apologise for, hide, and fear — in themselves and in others. It's the one that gets labelled “toxic” and “destructive” before anyone asks what it's actually trying to say.

But anger isn't the problem. It's the messenger.

In counselling, anger is treated as a signal — not the core issue, but the thing that points toward it. Beneath anger there's almost always something else. Grief. Fear. Shame. A boundary that was crossed. A need that isn't being met. A sense of powerlessness that has nowhere to go. Anger is what those things sound like when they don't have words.

Think about the last time you were really angry. Not annoyed — angry. The kind where your chest tightens and your jaw locks and you can feel it in your hands. What was actually happening? Were you afraid of losing something? Had you been carrying something alone for too long? Did someone cross a line you'd quietly drawn? Were you exhausted and running on empty? Were you grieving something and anger felt safer than sadness?

The people who come to counselling for “anger issues” are rarely people who enjoy being angry. They're people who are tired. Tired of snapping at their partner. Tired of losing it over small things — a misplaced key, a late reply, a dirty dish — and knowing the reaction doesn't match the trigger. Tired of the aftermath: the guilt, the shame, the repair, the promises to do better, the cycle repeating.

The work isn't about suppressing anger. Suppression doesn't work — it just moves the pressure elsewhere. The work is about understanding the specific architecture of your anger. What sets it off. What it's protecting. What it's pointing to that hasn't been addressed.

Sometimes the thing underneath is old. A pattern from childhood where your needs weren't met and anger was the only way to be heard. Sometimes it's current — a relationship, a job, a situation where you're giving more than you're getting and the imbalance has become unbearable. Sometimes it's grief wearing anger's clothes.

Anger management in counselling isn't about learning to count to ten. It's about developing a relationship with your anger where you can hear what it's telling you without it running the show.

If anger has been running your reactions more than you'd like — in your relationship, at work, with your kids, in traffic, in the quiet moments when you're alone with your own frustration — it's worth looking at what's underneath. Not because anger makes you a bad person. Because the thing it's pointing to deserves attention.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

27/08/2026

A new report from Ending Loneliness Together found that 1 in 2 Australians are lonely, socially isolated, or both. Half the country.

The group most affected isn't who you'd guess. It's not teenagers or elderly people living alone. It's 45 to 54 year olds. People in midlife — often with jobs, families, mortgages, full calendars. People who look connected from the outside.

Loneliness has been quietly treated as a secondary issue in mental health — something that happens alongside anxiety or depression but isn't the main event. The research is making clear that's wrong. Loneliness isn't a symptom. It's a driver. Chronic loneliness changes your nervous system, your immune function, your cognitive performance. It increases the risk of depression, anxiety, cardiovascular disease, and early mortality. The health impact of chronic loneliness is comparable to smoking 15 ci******es a day.

The report's most striking finding is also its simplest: having just one friend reduces loneliness and social isolation by 89%. Not a network. Not a community. Not a strategy. One person.

The problem is that “just make a friend” isn't advice someone can use when they're already lonely. Loneliness makes connection harder. It narrows your world. You withdraw. You decline invitations. You stop reaching out because you assume people don't want to hear from you. You become less likely to initiate contact and more likely to interpret neutral interactions as rejection. The longer it goes on, the harder it is to break.

For a lot of people in midlife, the loneliness crept up. It started with a job change, a move, a divorce, kids leaving home, a friendship fading because nobody had time. There wasn't a single moment where loneliness arrived — it accumulated in the gaps left by the structures that used to hold social life together.

If this is where you are, counselling won't fix loneliness by giving you friends. But it can help with the part that keeps loneliness stuck — the beliefs that have formed around it. “People don't really want me around.” “I'm boring.” “I'd be bothering them.” “They have their own lives.” The withdrawal that felt like self-protection and became isolation.

Loneliness is a mental health issue. Not because there's something wrong with you for feeling it, but because of what it does to your mind, your body, and your life when it becomes chronic. You don't have to wait until it becomes depression to take it seriously.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

26/08/2026

When most people picture depression, they picture sadness. Crying. Staying in bed. Not being able to function.

But for a lot of people, depression doesn't look like that. It looks like nothing.

You go to work. You do your job. You come home. You eat dinner. You watch something. You go to bed. You get up the next day and do it again. From the outside, you're fine. Functioning. Coping.

Inside, it's different. Nothing is wrong, but nothing is right either. The things that used to bring pleasure — a hobby, a meal, a conversation, a weekend — don't land anymore. You feel flat. Not sad, not angry, not anxious. Flat. Like someone turned the contrast down on your life and everything is slightly grey.

You might not even recognise it as depression. You think: I'm just tired. I'm just busy. It's just winter. I'm getting older. Everyone feels like this. It's normal.

It's not normal. It's a presentation of depression that clinicians sometimes call anhedonia — the inability to feel pleasure. Life continues on the surface, but the internal experience has gone quiet. Not painful, but not alive either. Numb.

This version of depression is hard to spot — in yourself and in others — because the person is still functioning. They're still showing up. They're not in crisis. They don't look like someone who needs help. So they don't seek it. The flatness becomes the new normal. Years pass.

The risk of functioning depression is that it doesn't trigger intervention. No one is worried. The person isn't worried. The absence of feeling becomes so familiar that it's mistaken for personality. “I'm just not a very emotional person.” “I'm just low-key.” “I'm just chill.”

But underneath the flatness, the system is depleted. The energy it takes to maintain "fine" — to keep showing up, keep performing, keep going through the motions of a life you're not actually present in — is enormous. By the time it cracks, the depression has been running for a long time.

If your life looks fine on paper and feels like nothing underneath. It's worth looking at. Counselling can help you understand what happened to the colour, and whether it can come back.

25/08/2026

New research from The Growth Distillery and Medibank found something that sounds like a contradiction but isn't: 82% of Australians feel better after talking about their mental health. But 51% choose to stay silent.

That's not a knowledge gap. Most people know that talking helps. The problem is what happens between knowing it and doing it.

The research identified the barriers. People stay silent because they don't want to burden others. Because they don't know what to say. Because they're afraid of how the other person will react. Because they've tried before and it didn't go well. Because the idea of saying something out loud makes it more real than it was in their head.

52% of Australians now rely on social media as their primary source of mental health information — outpacing health professionals (31%). Among 18-35 year olds, it's 74% vs 21%. People are looking for answers, but they're looking in places that don't require them to be seen.

The silence isn't stubbornness. It's self-protection. When you're struggling, the idea of telling someone — of making it real, of watching their reaction, of becoming someone who “has a problem” — can feel like a bigger threat than the struggling itself. So you manage it privately. You scroll. You read other people's stories. You tell yourself you'll deal with it later.

But “later” has a way of becoming “never.” The thing you don't name doesn't resolve. It sits. It changes shape. It becomes the background noise of your life — the tiredness, the irritability, the sense that something is off but you can't quite say what.

The research makes one thing clear: people who talk feel better. Not because talking fixes everything, but because it breaks the isolation that makes everything worse. The silence is the thing that hurts.

The barrier isn't knowing that talking helps. It's finding the right person and the right space to start. That's where counselling comes in. Not because a counsellor has magic words. Because a counsellor is someone whose job is to hear you — without judgment, without rushing to fix, without making it about themselves. The conversation starts in a room where you don't have to worry about burdening anyone.

If you've been silent — for weeks, months, years — the silence isn't protecting you the way you think it is. The first conversation doesn't have to be the whole story. It can be: “I've been struggling, and I don't really know where to start.” That's enough. That's how it begins.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

25/08/2026

A new study from Curtin University, published last week, used data from more than 6,300 Australian households. The findings are stark.

Children who experience parental loss are twice as likely to develop a mental health disorder as children who haven't. 21.4% of children who experienced parental loss had a diagnosable condition — anxiety, depression, ADHD — compared to 10.8% of children who had not.

The type of loss matters. Children who lost a parent to death had the highest rate of mental disorder: 28.8%. Parent in custody: 21.9%. Parents separated: 20.2%. All forms of loss were linked to poorer mental health, but death had the strongest impact.

Behind these numbers are children trying to make sense of something that doesn't make sense. A parent who was there every morning and is suddenly not. A routine built around a person who is gone. A developmental stage interrupted by grief that the child doesn't have the cognitive or emotional tools to process.

Children's grief doesn't look like adult grief. It comes and goes. A child might be devastated in the morning and playing with friends by afternoon. That doesn't mean they're fine — it means they're processing in the only way they can, in bursts, between the normal business of being a child. They may not have the words for what they're feeling. They may not even know what they're feeling. It shows up in behaviour: regression, anger, withdrawal, clinginess, sleep disruption, school refusal, sudden fear about the safety of their remaining parent.

The study's lead researcher noted that losing a parent amplifies the issues already facing children. Navigating the world as a child or teenager has never been more complex. When grief lands on top of that complexity, children are vulnerable.

Here's what matters for parents and carers: you can't prevent the grief. You can't fix it. But you can make sure it doesn't have to be carried alone. Grief support for children isn't about making them feel better in the way adults want them to feel better. It's about giving them a space to express what they're experiencing — in their language, at their pace, without the pressure to be “resilient” or “brave” or “handling it well.”

If a child in your life has lost a parent — whether recently or years ago — the grief doesn't have an expiration date. It changes shape as they grow. What they couldn't process at five will resurface at ten, at fifteen, at twenty. Support at any stage can help. Early support can change the trajectory.

Counselling for children and families dealing with grief is available. Paul works with adults navigating their own grief, supporting grieving children, and the complex intersection of both.

24/08/2026

70% of employed Australians have experienced burnout. The Australian Psychological Society recently highlighted this in a feature headlined “My body whispers before it screams.” The phrase is exactly right.

Burnout doesn't arrive fully formed. It builds. The body sends signals first — and most of us override them.

The tension in your shoulders that you carry for weeks. The sleep that doesn't come, or doesn't refresh. The morning headache. The stomach that's not quite right. The cold that lingers longer than it should because your immune system is running on empty.

Then come the cognitive signs. Brain fog. Forgetting simple things. The task that used to take an hour now takes three. The email you read four times without absorbing. The afternoon where you stare at your screen and nothing happens.

Then the emotional signs. Irritability that surprises you — snapping at someone over something small. Cynicism. The things that used to matter don't anymore. A flatness that sits over everything. The sense that every day is a marathon you haven't trained for. The anxiety about the week ahead that starts on Sunday afternoon.

The mistake is waiting until the body screams. The whisper stage is when intervention works best — when the patterns are forming but haven't hardened. Counselling at the whisper stage isn't about crisis intervention. It's about looking at what's driving the burnout, what boundaries need to shift, what you're carrying that you don't need to, and what your body is trying to tell you before it has to shout.

If your body is whispering, now is the time to listen. Not when it screams.

24/08/2026

The federal government recently launched a campaign called “Quiet the Head Noise.” It's promoting a new digital mental health service — the Medicare Mental Health Check In — and the framing is spot on.

“Head noise” is the worries, doubts, and mental load that become difficult to quiet. It's the conversation you replay at 2am. The list of things you might have forgotten. The worst-case scenario that plays out in your head before anything has actually happened. The sinking feeling on Sunday afternoon. The sense that something is wrong even when nothing specific is wrong.

For some people, head noise is manageable. It comes and goes. It's tied to a specific stressor — a deadline, a conflict, a decision — and when the stressor passes, the noise settles. For others, it doesn't settle. It becomes the background hum of daily life. You stop noticing it's there because it's always there. You just feel tired. Wired but tired. Switched on but unable to focus. Present but not really there.

More than one in five Australian adults experience mental health challenges in any given year. Among young people, the figure doubles. The government's campaign makes an important point: mental health care is not only for moments of crisis. You don't need to be at breaking point to get support. The head noise doesn't have to be deafening before it's worth addressing.

The difficulty is that head noise is hard to identify from inside it. When your mind has been running at that speed for months, it feels normal. You think: this is just how I am. I'm a worrier. I overthink things. It's just my personality. But anxiety isn't a personality trait. It's a pattern of thinking that can shift — not by trying harder to stop thinking, but by understanding what's driving the pattern and working with it differently.

Counselling for anxiety isn't about emptying your mind or learning to relax. It's about understanding the specific patterns your particular mind runs — the themes it gravitates toward, the triggers that set it off, the behaviours that reinforce it. It's practical. You learn to recognise the noise, name it, and work with it rather than being swept along by it.

If the head noise has been there for a while — if it's affecting your sleep, your concentration, your mood, your ability to be present with the people around you — it's not something you have to just live with. You don't have to wait for a crisis. The noise itself is reason enough.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

23/08/2026

A new report from Women's Mental Health Australia surveyed 9,000 women. The headline: one in two Australian women is experiencing a mental health issue. Almost one in four is experiencing severe psychological distress.

The report is called “Beyond the Surface 2026,” and its central finding is the one that matters most: women's mental health is shaped by the pressures women carry, not by a lack of individual resilience.

Financial stress. Sleep deprivation. Ageing. Societal expectations. Work and care demands. Physical illness and chronic pain. Gendered experiences including family and sexual violence, financial dependency, caring responsibilities, single parenting. Women living with female-specific health conditions — endometriosis, pelvic floor disorders, pregnancy loss, physical birth trauma — report significantly higher psychological distress than other women.

The report makes a point that needs repeating: if you treat a woman's pain without ever asking about her mental health, you've only done half the job. The system asks women to sort out their body in one place and their mind in another. But the person living with chronic pain, sleep deprivation, financial stress, and caregiving responsibilities doesn't experience these as separate problems. They experience them as one thing: the load that's wearing them down.

If you've been told you're “just stressed” or “should prioritise self-care” — and the stress is coming from structural pressures that self-care can't fix — counselling can help you name what's happening and figure out what to do about it. Not by adding another task to your list. By helping you put the list down and look at it with someone.

Paul Hammat is a PACFA Registered Clinical Counsellor in Keilor, Melbourne, and via telehealth across Australia. No referral required.

A Counselling Concern

29/08/2026

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