More women than ever before are visiting the Women's Centre, for help with stress, depression, anxiety and suicide.

Stressed, anxious and depressed women have overloaded one Christchurch mental health provider, forcing it to turn people away.

The pressure comes as funding information for the Canterbury District Health Board's (CDHB) upcoming financial year, obtained by Stuff, shows mental health funding is expected to drop to about $210 per head of population, while the national average increases to over $250.

The cuts are a shock for the community-based Women's Centre, which is experiencing its busiest period in its 30 years.

Manager Ardas Tredus said before the earthquakes 40 per cent of clients were experiencing depression or mental health issues. Since the earthquakes it has jumped to 80 per cent.

After the Christmas break, the centre fielded 54 calls in three weeks from women needing counselling – double what it would normally expect.

In 2015, most clients were seeking help for relationship issues, depression/mental health/suicide, or anxiety/self-esteem. Domestic violence and abuse, which the centre originally opened to cater for, was a distant fourth.

"There's less counsellors available and an enormous amount of pressure. We've never had so many women phone," Tredus said.

The centre's wait list, which holds 40 names, has just reopened after being cut off and clients turned away.

Tredus said the closure of other mental health services, such as Relationships Aotearoa last year, put them under further pressure.

"A lot is still quake-related. But it's also women who have never come to the centre because they were just ticking along nicely. Normal women with families have just come out of the woodwork because they can't cope anymore, and the ones who weren't coping already are just more severe."

Funding from the centre's main providers had dropped by about $9000 since 2013. Meanwhile, costs were rising, Tredus said, and the centre had been forced to raise about $60,000 itself.

She estimated it had about four months worth of revenue left until it had to close its doors.

Last week, when the CDHB presented its case to the Health Select Committee, chief executive David Meates said the system was "running very close to the wind on a number of services" and at risk of "starting to implode".

Labour's health spokeswoman Annette King raised the issue in Parliament, asking Health Minister Jonathan Coleman about the region's insufficient funding and why the Government had "turned a blind eye" to the CDHB's request for $4.1 million extra for mental health services.

Coleman replied there "is not insufficient funding".

"It is a huge budget and the chief executive has to make decisions at his discretion in order to provide the services that people down there need."

King told Stuff she could "sense the frustration" from the city's health professionals.

"This is an appalling story, you have a DHB that is world-leading, but can't get funding.

"I just don't know why there's such a downer on Canterbury. There's going to be a disaster that occurs in mental health and people will say 'why wasn't this picked up?'. The truth is that the Government knows it and the ministry knows it."

The Ministry of Social Development (MSD) has already decreased its funding for community-based organisations from $1.6m to $200,000 and halved trauma counselling funding.

MSD spokeswoman Moira Underdown said demand in the area had slowed significantly and there was still money in reserves to deal with unexpected events.