When I was a teenager back in the 90s things were a lot different then what they are today.

Back then alcohol consumption stopped before you felt like throwing up, mental illness didn’t extend past ADD and goth emo culture and nobody could afford the internet, let alone get bullied on it.

While the ‘State of Australia’s Young People Report’ (good to see bureaucratic imagination is dead), is yet to be officially released, Youth Minister Kate Ellis today gave us a snapshot of what it contains.

After god knows how much taxdollars were spent preparing the report, it seems Australia’s youth are more stuffed then a recent caught-out-lying fourteen year old’s bra at a Pink concert.

In the information that Ellis released today I think the  statistic that needs an explanation the most is the claim “one in four youths aged 16-24 were found to have a mental health disorder”.

Do one in four youths really have a mental illness or is it simply a reflection that society has come up with a dozen different syndromes as scapegoats for shithouse parenting?

Kids are murdering their parents because they can’t play xbox, bashing disabled teenage girls because their mothers cheered them on and driving eachother to suicide over unsupervised cyber bullying.

Child mental health syndromes are rapidly being pulled out of psychologist’s arses and applied to an ever younger age group.

Your kid didn’t get an even number of McChicken Nuggets in their Happy Meal? Quick sign them up to our 12 step therapy program before you ruin there chances of ever becoming primeminister.

Accidentally packed orange juice in your kids lunch on tropical juice day? Go grab that kid out of school and take them to a doctor immediately for some pills. Jesus Christ your kid could be the next Hitler.

The Lollypop man didn’t wave to your kid and individually greet them? Grab that crossing stick of him and beat the smug bastard mercilessly into a bloody pulp. Teach him a lesson for ruining your kids life.

These are obviously slight exaggerations but they’re not entirely that far from the truth. These days you seem to have two types of parents:

Those that are so paranoid about doing wrong by their kids that they strip them of any sense of self worth or independence that it’s no wonder they grow up with mental problems, or those that don’t give a shit and wait till the courts diagnose their precious with the latest syndrome to explain why strangling kittens gets their rocks off.

The common thread here of coruse is the mental illness. With thousands of syndromes being invented on a daily basis the average teenager experiences about sixty three thousand types of mental illness a year.

Instead of highlighting the atrociously shit job parents do these days, we simply continue to diagnose kids with fad syndrome ‘A’ and pretend it’s some unavoidable side effect of living in a modern society.

One in four youths has mental illness my arse.

The report continues:

More than a quarter of Year 8 students knew someone who had been cyber-bullied.


Well gee, what isn’t cyber bullying these days? If the internet means that much to you that you can’t handle someone writing crap about you on their Facebook profile it’s time to end it. Seriously.

I know teenagers are fickle and impressionable but cmon, the scope of cyber bullying is just so ridiculously wide theses days. Someone typing ‘Johnny sux’ into Google during IT class now results in thirty years of intense cyber-bullying therapy for poor not-so-little-now Johnny.

Recently at Western Heights College in Geelong a few students decided life was too hard and took the easy way out because people were making fun of them online. A Current Affair wanted to air a story on it, but oh no then along came mental illness group Beyond Blue and put an end to that.

They feared the story would spark mass copycat suicides.

Yeah because you know, burying the information and pretending it never happened will clearly fix the problem right? Nevermind the parents that allow their horror kids to run amok over the internet driving other kids to suicide.

No instead it’s big bad A Current Affair that needs to be stopped.

When it comes to cyber bullying it seems going after the culprits and charging them and their parents is taboo. As a result everyone (including the perpetrators) are then labelled victims to these faceless attacks. The media are then gagged and forced to pretend it never happens.

What a crock.

Finally the report settles on alcohol citing that ‘Teenagers aged 15-19 had the highest hospitalisation rates for acute intoxication from alcohol.’

Well, duh.

Go into the city on any given night and take a look around. There’s kids everywhere pissed out of their brains and nobody doing anything to curb it. Pub lockouts aren’t going to do jack to address the problem and the government’s too busy with their hand out collecting alcohol tax to do anything about it.

They did try to introduce an alcopops tax but all that achieved was an upsurge of teenage education on how to mix cocktails yourself. Like it wasn’t obvious that was going to happen.

As usual the Rudd government has put together another committee that has produced yet another report. Is there going to be anything in it we didn’t already know? Sure Australian youth are stuffed (Corey Worthington has been a wonderful posterboy for the movement) but instead of useless reports how about starting to tackle the problem?

Time to stop telling us something’s wrong and time to tackle deadbeat parents, introduce some HTFU in schools and take a serious look at alcohol availability for teens. It’s long overdue.


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