thanks sawe! i saw pdoc today and he finally did it for me, on the spot. i just read it over though and i think the technicalities are wrong () BUT he said if there was something wrong with it to get austin-t to give him a call and they'd sort it out.
and then he got distracted and told me how he saw austin-t last friday and austin-t was in a football jersey and pdoc felt like a social outcast at work because he hadn't realised it was "wear your team's jersey" day. but that he thought austin-t was going to take him out because austin-t looked like a footy player and pdoc felt very scared for his white shirt getting torn.
lololol i like it when they're in love.

oh impy, you're a rabid intellectual . i was thinking about you this morning and what you said a while back about how i would start finding more types of "me" people as i climbed the uni ladder. i really hope so, because i still feel kind of outcasty everywhere and the "me" people i've found are currently in the States.
yeah - the GP was from the same (similar) regional background as me. or rather, as my parents - i was born in australia. they are probably the same generation. so it wasn't racist as in "go back to your own country" it was more "you're one of 'us' and this is how 'we' do things". in a sense though the race (culture) issue is similar for me regardless of where it comes from - it's a pressure to conform to a nominated cultural worldview, typically that i don't fit into. even though i was born in australia, i grew up with migrant parents, with a migrant extended family, in a migrant community etc. so there are many aspects of the dominant "australian" culture which i don't fit in with either. and the race thing comes in because people see the colour of my skin and make assumptions about me because of it, both positive and negative, but rarely anything accurate. like sw628 said, i often wish i was transparent.

re: making a complaint. gosh, yknow, i just cant be bothered. i've seen enough bad GPs, this is just another one in a long long line of them. i talked to pdoc about this today - the monday GP in particular, and then it turned into a bit of a mope about all GPs and i think i even chucked in a bit about old-T (poor pdoc had been trying to wrap up, i think i extended the session a further 20mins). it was good to talk to pdoc about it, because the GP thing does upset me in general. i left my last GP (who i'd been seeing fairly regularly for 2 years) because she got upset that i applied for & accepted my honours offer. old-T often used to tell me the depression was of my own creating, because if i just dropped uni i would be happy etc. somehow people in general seem to think they're all amateur psychologists and that the real mental health professionals (who i've been consulting for a long time) haven't somehow assessed the bleeding obvious options. /rant . pdoc is so good at validating me, i love him so much. and it's a topic that hits close to home for him too - he gets angry about the perception out there that psychiatrists are bottom of the rung physicians, not required etc. so we had a good 20mins of one-upping each other about all the mindblowingly stupid things that have been hurled our way by various medical professionals.

he told me he'd find me a good GP though. he said the first person he would swear on was probably too far away for me to travel to, but then he got all excited because he knows a few GPs personally at a centre just a bus ride away from me, so he said he'd get their address and pass the details on properly next time. and he said that because they work as a group, that if one of them isnt available on the day i needed that person that he'd just as happily recommend the other one, and that all my records could stay in the same place. so i feel a bit better about that. the more i think about it the more i realise im just so lucky to have fallen in with pdoc - i could have just as easily have got the pdoc who works in the room right next to him, and that pdoc has a reputation for being a bit of an a**hole. and because i was 20 and it was my first time with a pdoc, i wouldnt have known any better and just accepted poor treatment as par for the course.

thanks, darling!!! yeah, pdoc wrote a referral for 18 sessions, but i dont think he's allowed to do that until i've finished the first 12. it's good to know that i can switch from a GP referral to a pdoc referral though - that was my main concern, how they would figure that. but it sounds like medicare might be flexible.
i think it's beyondblue who have the depression friendly professionals listing - unfortunately nothing came up in my area that would bulk bill, and i really can't afford to pay even more to maintain my health. but if the GPs that pdoc suggests dont work out i might look back at beyondblue again and just do a wider area search.
thank you SO MUCH for looking all of that up for me . it's really confusing to figure out when the pros don't even know the rules themselves.