An article worth reading imo. Victoria and NSW are given as examples of the approach to mental health that is gravely failing Australians. In general, the picture is pretty alarming:
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.
That $919 average for smoking is wild. Only about a quarter of households have a smoker, so those are carrying the other three quarters. When a pack of cigarettes costs up to $50, I guess it’s pretty easy to spend $919. That’s only about 1.5 packets per week.
When I was a kid, ‘pack a day’ was a common expression. I wonder whether that still is? Because Even if you can source them at $30/packet, that’s over $10k per year. I’m seeing how the black market has sprung up.
I also was shocked by the $919 figure. Then I remembered the older men and women I’ve seen buying cigs at my local newsagent. Some cigarette packs are over $50 and I’ve seen them buying one of those together with loose tobacco for rollies which I guess stretches out the tobacco for that week.
My dad was a ‘two-pack-a-day’ smoker. He died a lot sooner than he should have. He wouldn’t have been able to afford his habit these days. It might have helped him to live longer.
I suspect it probably is for older smokers. Admittedly this was about a decade ago now, but I used to work in a petrol station and sold cigarettes to the same people every week. Some of them were buying multiple large packs (50s) across a week. Working in that environment really opened my eyes to how wasteful many Australians are with their money.
