Rising concern about youth mental health in Australia has intensified scrutiny of the role social media, early intervention, and existing support systems play in shaping outcomes for young people and their families. Frontline observations reveal gaps between lived experience and institutional response, raising broader questions about how evidence is recognised, who informs policy, and whether current approaches are equipped to respond to emerging behavioural risks at scale.
I sounded the social media alarm nine years too early. Everyone dismissed me, and then, in 2025, Australia banned social media for kids under 16. It raises the question: what else are we missing because frontline workers aren’t taken seriously, and how can we change things?
Let me take you back to the 2010s for a moment. Every school holidays for eight years, I got something most experts never get: a snapshot of the nation.
Not from surveys or clinical studies, but from 70 families arriving at the quarterly camps we held for at-risk youth. They came from everywhere: wealthy suburbs and housing commissions; doctors’ kids and tradies’ kids; immigrants and fifth-generation Australians; and indigenous families and white-collar professionals.
All of them carried the same burden. Their children were broken, the system had failed them, and I was their last option.
The quarterly gathering nobody talks about
Four times a year, these families would converge on our program. For nine days straight, I spent 18 hours a day with their teenagers. That’s 162 contact hours per program. Compare that to the 50-minute therapy sessions these same kids had been attending for years, and the math tells you everything.
Here’s what made this program different. These weren’t isolated cases scattered across appointment books. This was a concentrated cross-section of Australian society, all dealing with the same crisis, all in one place at the same time. It meant I could see patterns the experts couldn’t.
While psychologists were seeing one troubled teen per hour in their office, I was watching 70 of them interact, break down, and rebuild together. While doctors were prescribing medication based on 15-minute consultations, I was observing these kids for days on end.
And what I saw terrified me.
The pattern that emerged in 2017
By the second year, something became crystal clear. Every single family, regardless of background, was dealing with the same root cause. Not anxiety or depression, not attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) or oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), and not any of the other labels these kids had been given.
It was social media addiction.
These children were glued to their phones, constantly seeking validation from strangers and essentially carrying their bullies in their pockets 24/7. They were living in a toxic cesspool of comparison and self-hatred, and nobody was talking about it.
The allied health professionals kept saying the spike in youth mental illness was because ‘the stigma had been removed’ and kids were just more comfortable seeking help now.
I pushed back hard on that narrative. If removing stigma was the cause, then we’d see improvement after five or six years, but that wasn’t the case. The crisis kept accelerating. Between 2011 and 2021, psychological distress among 15 to 24-year-olds more than doubled, jumping from 18.4% to 42.3%.
The real cause was in their hands. Literally.
What 18 hours a day reveals
On day one, these kids throw every trick at you, from manipulation and self-pity to excuses that have worked on their parents for years.
‘I can’t do that.’
‘You can’t make me.’
‘I’m having a panic attack.’
Some literally make themselves pass out to prove their condition is real. We have medics on site to check and, most of the time, it’s performance.
By day three, something shifts and the walls start coming down, not because we’re sitting in a comfortable office talking about feelings, but because we’ve pushed them physically. We’ve made them uncomfortable and removed the cotton wool that society has wrapped them in.
We jump out of planes together, do physical training in pouring rain at 6:00 am, and put them through difficult situations with tools and guidance. Most importantly, we are right beside them, leading by example.
In those moments of shared struggle, they start talking, and, by day three, you get the truth. They share the real story behind the anxiety diagnosis, the actual reason for depression, how low self-esteem has led to school suspensions… The list goes on.
This is what 50-minute therapy sessions miss. You can’t rush vulnerability or schedule breakthrough moments between 2:00 pm and 2:50 pm on a Tuesday. Real connection happens in the suck, when everyone’s tired and cold and pushing past what they thought they could handle.
The parents nobody sees
Here’s what shocked me most: the parents were suffering just as much as the kids, and maybe more.
Over ten times, I heard the same devastating words: ‘I’m ready to surrender my child to the Department of Social Services. I have no more options and I can’t keep going.’
These were good people. Loving parents who had spent years in the system, seeing countless specialists, trying every medication, and following every recommendation, only to see their children getting worse.
The shame and guilt were crushing them. They felt isolated, as if they were the only family going through this nightmare, and like they’d failed as parents.
So, I started putting them in group chats together. We created communities of over 100 parents, all sharing their struggles, realising they weren’t alone and discovering that raising a child in 2026 is harder than it’s ever been, and the system isn’t equipped to help.
That moment when the shame lifts is beautiful. One parent shares their story. Another realises it’s almost identical to theirs. Someone else adds a detail that resonates with 10 more families. Suddenly, this isolated crisis becomes a shared experience, and they all start healing.
The snapshot nobody wanted to see
Every three months, I was getting fresh data through new families, new stories, and new evidence of what was really happening across Australia. All of which let me identify trends years before mainstream outlets, and the patterns were undeniable.
Kids medicated since age 10. Multiple medications: antidepressants, anti-anxiety meds, ADHD medication, sleep aids, and even some kids on four or five different prescriptions.
None of it was working.
Nobody was addressing the cause, which was the phone and constant dopamine hits. The validation-seeking comparison trap and 24/7 access to content that would destroy an adult’s mental health, let alone a 13-year-old’s.
I watched this pattern repeat across thousands of families, from wealthy families whose kids had access to the best private psychologists in Sydney to poor families whose kids were seeing bulk-billing GPs. Even professional families where both parents were doctors or psychologists themselves, and the outcome was the same.
It was years of treatment, worsening symptoms, increasing medication, declining school performance, rising suspensions, and growing isolation. Until they found us.
The cost of being right too early
In 2017, I started sounding the alarm about social media addiction, and nobody listened.
Allied health professionals dismissed it, policy makers ignored it, and the media wasn’t interested.
I didn’t have the right credentials, a PhD in psychology or published research. All I had was thousands of hours with thousands of families and undeniable results, but that wasn’t enough. I was on the frontlines, and I was being ignored.
So, I kept documenting, gathering evidence, and watching more families arrive every three months with the same story.
For almost a decade, I watched children get destroyed while I held the solution.
That’s what broke me. Not the hard work or long hours, but the knowledge that early intervention could have saved most of these families’ years of pain. Students first suspended during primary school had a 54% chance of repeat suspensions, and we could have caught them after that first suspension.
Instead, they came to us after the eighth suspension, years of medication, and once the family had completely broken down.
The system was using us as a last resort when we should have been the first call.
When the nation finally listened
It took Senator Jacqui Lambie mentoring on my 40th program to change things. She saw what I’d been seeing and she understood the urgency. Most importantly, she had the platform I didn’t.
Then came the 7 Spotlight investigation on beating screen addiction. Suddenly, the evidence I’d been gathering for years was national news with those who know how to make change standing beside me.
A few months later, in September 2024, the Prime Minister announced the under-16 social media ban. This was almost a decade after I first identified the problem.
I wonder: how many children were destroyed in that time? How many families fell apart? How many parents reached the point of surrendering their kids to the Department of Social Services?
I’ll never know the exact number, but I saw enough of them every three months to understand the scale of what we lost.
What the quarterly pulse taught me
Most experts see individual cases, isolated incidents, and single data points. I saw the whole picture.
Every three months, Australia’s youth crisis walked through my door from every demographic, background, and type of family structure.
And they all told the same story or stories. The system had failed them. The medications weren’t working. The therapy wasn’t helping. The school suspensions kept coming. The isolation kept growing.
Until someone finally addressed the root cause.
The crisis isn’t complicated and the solution isn’t mysterious. We know what’s destroying our children. We just spent a decade pretending we didn’t.
Because the person sounding the alarm didn’t have the right letters after his name. Because the solution didn’t come from inside the system. Because admitting the problem meant admitting the system had failed. I have sounded the alarm on trends for years and will continue to do so before it becomes documented knowledge. Maybe policy makers will start asking questions and looking for advice and solutions in all areas, not just those all trained from the same textbook.
This is what it means to be on the frontline. Every three months, the evidence kept arriving, and I kept taking notes.
Now, with my new business, The Youth Regiment, I’m done waiting for permission or being the last resort. I’m done watching families suffer for years before they find help. Early intervention isn’t just better than late-stage crisis response; it’s the only thing that works, and I’ve got eight years of quarterly snapshots to prove it.
