Melbourne Psychotherapist Adam Szmerling Wins A 2026 Standout Award

MELBOURNE, Australia — Adam Szmerling, the psychotherapist who founded Bayside Psychotherapy in 2009, has won a 2026 Standout Award, an independent award for small businesses and people who work for themselves.

Szmerling opened the practice in Brighton, in Melbourne's south-east, and moved it to nearby Highett in 2020. It now has eight practitioners, who see adults and couples at the Highett clinic and by video anywhere in Australia.

Four kinds of help, one practice

Bayside Psychotherapy offers four kinds of help under one name: longer-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy, clinical psychology, shorter-term counselling and clinical hypnotherapy.

Szmerling's own work is psychoanalytic psychotherapy with adults. He is a clinical registrant with the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia and an accredited mental health social worker, with more than 20 years of face-to-face practice, and he provides clinical supervision to other psychotherapists. Clients with a mental health treatment plan from their GP can claim Medicare rebates for sessions with him.

He describes his approach plainly on his professional website: "I don't offer quick fixes." He adds that "most of what I do is listen."

A familiar voice on difficult subjects

For more than a decade, Szmerling has explained subjects people find hard to talk about to a general audience. In 2015 he told ABC News that compulsive shopping "can destroy relationships." In 2018 he spoke to SBS about night eating syndrome, and in 2025 he discussed phobias with RPA eMagazine.

"Fear is an important, fundamental emotional response, and it reminds us that we are human," he told the magazine.

The need for help

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics' National Study of Mental Health and Wellbeing, conducted between 2020 and 2022, 42.9% of Australians aged 16 to 85 have experienced a mental disorder at some point in their lives, and 21.5% had one in the previous 12 months. Anxiety was the most common group, at 17.2%. Over the same 12-month period, 17.4%, about 3.4 million people, saw a health professional for their mental health.

What stood out

The Standout Awards reviews each entry on three things: the quality of the work, the results customers describe and what sets the business apart.

"Keeping a small practice going for this long is an achievement in itself," the Standout Awards said. "Szmerling has built one that offers several kinds of help in one place, kept his own clinical work at the centre of it, and spent years explaining difficult subjects in plain language. That is the kind of work our badge is meant to point to."

About the Standout Awards