Public psychology in Portugal is free, and hard to get to. Care runs through your family doctor (médico de família) at a health centre, who can refer you on to psychology there or at a mental health unit. But there are only around six hundred psychologists in the entire national health service, fewer than forty public entities offer psychology appointments at all, and waiting times for a first appointment run from a couple of months in the quicker districts to the best part of a year in the slower ones.
There's nothing to claim back either. Portugal has no national scheme that reimburses sessions with a private psychologist of your choosing, so private therapy is paid directly to the therapist and the rate on the profile is what you pay. Some private insurance policies and ADSE, the public employees' scheme, may cover part of a consultation, depending on the policy.
What private practice does give you is a way of knowing exactly who you are dealing with. Psicólogo is a protected title in Portugal. To practise you must be registered with the Ordem dos Psicólogos Portugueses (OPP) and hold a cédula profissional, a licence number, and psychologists are required to identify themselves by it. Using the title without registration is a criminal offence. The route to it is fixed: a psychology degree, a master's, OPP registration, then a supervised professional year before the title is granted. Psychotherapy is a further recognised speciality on top of that, trained through societies approved by the OPP.
The OPP keeps a public register you can search by name or by cédula number. Where a therapist listed on It's Complicated works as a psychologist, we check their OPP registration before they appear, and you can confirm it independently.
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