Psychiatrist and former Australian of the Year Professor Patrick McGorry has spent the last five years leading a ground-breaking study, just published in The Lancet, into the mental health of today’s youth. Depressingly, but perhaps not surprisingly, the report claims that mental health illness amongst young people globally is ‘the largest and most rapidly growing cause of disability and lost human potential and productivity across the lifespan’. The report claims two out of five young people in Australia, and internationally, are suffering from some form of mental sickness.

Wandering into broader sociological commentary, the report also argues that, ‘Young people are showing the most serious warning signs and symptoms of a society and a world that is in serious trouble.’ Indeed, the report goes on to mention that ‘under the radar, the public is simmering about this issue. If you talk to any family and anyone that’s trying to access mental health care, they’ve had terrible difficulty.’

Of particular concern in the report is the period of Covid lockdowns, mandates and school closures, which of course included all sorts of draconian measures that curtailed the fun and enjoyment of key years of social and personal development for many teenagers; the ‘wonder years’.

The focus of the report, self-evidently, is the need for greater medical resources and funding to address these challenges.

The report even apportions the blame for the mental health crisis. ‘This has to be social and economic forces that are doing this,’ says the report.

That may well be the case, but equally, what of the political and cultural forces?

For at least two decades, parents have watched with increasing concern as their children face relentless left-wing political indoctrination on an industrial scale within secondary schools, universities and, increasingly, junior schools and even kindergartens. This leftist indoctrination is now so severe that it eclipses traditional areas of learning with a veritable grab-bag of socialist and neo-Marxist ‘causes’ that if taken literally can only do harm to impressionable young minds.

Many elderly migrants to Australia who were unfortunate enough to have grown up experiencing either Maoist or Soviet indoctrination during their youths recognise the signs, and view what is happening in Australian schools with increasing dismay.

Put yourself, if you can bear to, into the shoes of a young Australian child today. For many, each and every school day begins with a peculiar ritual in which you are ‘welcomed’ by unknown dead individuals to your own country, which, it turns out, you don’t really belong in. You may even be forced to crouch down and place your hand on the ground and pledge a form of political or spiritual allegiance to these unknown persons, some of whom have yet to ‘emerge’ into this world. Accompanying these quasi-religious practices, the young child is also imbued, constantly and repeatedly, with a sense of shame and guilt if they happen to be of a certain skin colour. This shame – one of the most profound and debilitating human emotions and which cannot be shaken off or ever atoned for – stems from actions which are largely unspecified, perhaps even fictitious, over which you as a child had no involvement or control.

As the day progresses at school you are constantly reminded of this shame and guilt through posters, flags, and references to it during nearly each and every academic subject.

But that’s the good stuff. There’s far worse to come.

In any vaguely scientific area of learning, you will likely be informed that the planet we live on and which gives us such joy and abundance is in fact dirty, toxic and doomed. Indeed, life on this planet, if not the planet itself, is headed for extinction almost certainly within what would otherwise be your ‘lifetime’. Worse, you are constantly reminded that this hellish future could be entirely avoided if only more grown-ups, such as your neighbours or your grandparents, didn’t use plastic bags, drank with paper straws and drove different types of vehicles.

Still not feeling sufficiently down in the dumps? Wait til the lesson after lunch, where your pink-haired male teacher spends much of the class, as he always does, explaining to you that boys can be girls and girls can be boys and that if you are feeling a little blue it is because you are ‘trapped inside the wrong body’. The solution? Chop off your genitals. What a relief when the school bell finally rings!

On the way home you get to cover your face in a mask as you contemplate your guilt and shame stranded on a doomed planet in a country you don’t belong to trapped inside the wrong body.

No wonder there’s a mental health crisis amongst the young.