CANBERRA

RECENT FIGURES ON mental health problems in Australia, suggest that a country which began as a prison, inhabited by the toughest of the tough, has developed into a giant mental health institution.

“We appear to have gone from brutal penal colony to funny farm in the space of two hundred odd years,”‘ says Professor I. M. N. Tytled, whose next book Lighten Up For Fuck’s Sake will hit the shelves just before Christmas. “Something like forty three per cent of adult Australians claim they have had mental health disorders. In one of the richest countries on the planet, where lifestyle is second to none, where the poorest are richer than most. You have to ask yourself, is this real or imagined? I think Government has a case to answer because the powers in Canberra appear to believe they now exist only to cotton wool their citizens. Consider this: the well-meaning focus on mental health may well have prompted the very mental health issues it claims to address. Chicken and egg? Scrambled. It’s a salutary lesson: the more you nanny a society the more fragile it becomes. Governments can mess with the heads of citizens, simply because they have the money to do so and the weird notion that everyone needs help. Result: Generation Z, or whatever they call people born in the last twenty years – actually, these are marketing tools, not historical labels – are so disconnected and hypersensitive, and so full of their own self-righteousness and deservedness, that they can hardly interact any more. This bomb will explode if it is not defused.”