Online Grief and Loss Counselling Across Australia

Grief does not follow a script. It can arrive as silence, anger, exhaustion, relief, guilt about the relief, or a strange flatness that worries you more than tears would. It can surface months or years after a death, or before one, while you are still caring for someone you are already losing. If any of that sounds familiar, this page is for you.

I provide online grief and loss counselling for adults across Australia. Sessions are private, delivered by secure video, with no GP referral needed and no Medicare record of your care.

What brings people to grief counselling

People rarely come to me in the first week of a loss. They come when everything feels heavy, the people around them have quietly returned to their lives, and the expectation to be "doing better by now" has set in. They come because:

A parent, partner, child, sibling, or close friend has died, recently or long ago, and the loss is still shaping daily life.
Someone they love died by suicide, and the grief carries questions that ordinary condolences cannot reach.
They are grieving someone who is still alive: a parent with dementia, a family member in decline, a relationship that has ended without a funeral to mark it.
They are carers, or were carers for years, and the person they organised their life around is gone, taking part of their identity with them.
The loss happened in another country, in another language, and the rituals that would normally hold grief were out of reach.

Grief work is not about moving on or letting go. Much of it is about finding a way to carry the relationship forward in a changed form, and rebuilding an identity that the loss has rearranged. That is slower and more honest than the tidy stages people are often handed.

Suicide bereavement counselling

Losing someone to suicide is its own terrain. Alongside the grief there are often questions that loop without resolution, guilt that resists logic, anger that feels unspeakable, and a particular isolation: people around you may not know what to say, so they say nothing, or they say the wrong thing carefully.

This is an area I know professionally at a national level. I have served on lived experience advisory bodies in suicide prevention, including with Suicide Prevention Australia, Roses in the Ocean, and Lifeline, and my work in this field has been recognised with national suicide prevention awards. I also bring lived and living experience to this work; the detail of that belongs in the room rather than on a page, and I hold it there.

In suicide bereavement counselling, nothing you feel is treated as the wrong thing to feel. The work moves at your pace, in your language for what happened, and it makes room for the questions that may never fully close.

If you are in crisis now, this page is not the right support. Lifeline is available 24 hours on 13 11 14.

How grief and loss counselling works at LEXs

There is no program and no fixed number of sessions. Some people come for a handful of sessions around an anniversary or a fresh wave of grief; others stay longer because the loss is woven through other things: family, culture, faith, caring responsibilities, old trauma. We work with what is actually there.

Practically:

Sessions are 60 minutes, by secure video, from wherever you are in Australia. Longer 90-minute sessions are available where the work calls for them.
Sessions are available in English, Arabic, or both. Grief often lives in a first language, and you should not have to translate it.
No GP referral, no mental health treatment plan, and no Medicare record. For many people, particularly those in small communities or professions where privacy matters, that is part of why they choose this.

Grief across cultures

How we grieve is cultural before it is personal. The rituals, the obligations, the place of faith, what may be said aloud and what may not, who is permitted to fall apart and who must hold the family together: these differ profoundly across communities, and grief counselling that ignores them misses most of the picture.

A large part of my practice is with multicultural communities, with people grieving across borders, and with men who were taught that their grief should be invisible. If your grief does not look like the version in the pamphlets, it does not mean you are grieving wrongly. It usually means the pamphlet was written for someone else.

Fees

Sessions are $200 for 60 minutes and $260 for 90 minutes, paid at booking. There is no Medicare rebate, for the reasons above. Some private health funds rebate social work services; check your extras cover if that applies to you.

Who you would be working with

I am Michael Elwan, an Accredited Social Worker and the founder of LEXs, based in Perth and working with clients across Australia by telehealth. I am a PhD candidate at Charles Sturt University, and my professional work spans suicide prevention, multicultural mental health, and grief, including national advisory roles and the 2025 AASW National Excellence in Practice Award. You can read more on the about page.

Frequently asked questions

Is grief and loss counselling worth it?

If grief is interfering with how you live, work, sleep, or relate to people, or if you simply have nowhere to put it, then yes, structured support tends to help. Counselling does not shorten grief or talk you out of it. It gives the grief somewhere to go, with someone who is not exhausted by it and not frightened of it.

How soon after a loss should I start?

There is no correct interval. Some people come within weeks; many come months or years later, when the support around them has thinned out. Old grief is as legitimate a reason to start as new grief.

Do I need a referral or a diagnosis?

No. You can book directly. Grief is not a disorder, and you do not need a label to deserve support with it.

Can I do grief counselling online, and does it work?

Yes. Grief counselling online works in the same way as in-person work, and for many people it works better: you are at home, in your own space, able to fall apart without then driving home. It also means your location in Australia does not limit who you can work with.