Australians are experiencing extraordinary levels of psychological distress while mental health services remain underfunded and overstretched. The political cost will be measured not just in health outcomes, but in deepening distrust of government.

We are a species that struggles to sit with itself.

Watch what people actually do, rather than what they tell pollsters. Caffeine to start the day. Alcohol to end it. Nicotine to get through it. Cannabis, benzodiazepines, antidepressants, stimulants, opioids, sleeping pills. Endless scrolling. Compulsive exercise. Gambling. Food. Almost every adult in this country is running some form of daily chemistry experiment on their own mind. We are permanently uncomfortable with our state of being, and we spend extraordinary amounts of time and money trying to alter it.

The numbers tell the story. The average Australian household spends around $1,770 a year on alcohol. Households spent another $919 on average on tobacco, even as smoking rates fall. The national wastewater program estimates Australians spend more than $11 billion a year on drugs. Nearly one in three of us drinks at levels that put our health at risk. One in seven Australians, close to four million people, takes antidepressants, one of the highest rates in the world. Almost one in five of us, 5.2 million people, filled a prescription for a mental-health-related medication last year. Add it together and the social cost of tobacco alone is estimated at around $160 billion, and alcohol another $75 billion.

This is not a story about vice but a story about distress. A society that medicates itself on this scale, legally and illegally, prescribed and self-administered, is telling us something about how its people are travelling. And the formal data confirms it. More than two in five Australians will experience a diagnosable mental disorder in their lifetime. One in five experienced one in the past 12 months. Among young people aged 16 to 24, it is closer to two in five, and among young women it is almost one in two. Mental illness is now the most common reason Australians visit a GP. Suicide is the leading cause of death among young Australians.

If any physical illness afflicted the population at this scale, it would dominate every budget, every campaign and every question time. Instead, mental health sits in the second tier of the health portfolio, wheeled out for awareness weeks and quietly defunded in between.

The salience the political class refuses to see

The standard objection is that mental health does not show up as a top-order voting issue. This misreads how issue salience works. Voters do not walk into focus groups and announce that mental health determines their vote. What they describe instead is........

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