I’VE BEEN TEACHING at Australian universities for twenty-five years now. I began when I was twenty-seven – I’m now fifty-two. This means I’ve been next to university students since 1996, and if you’re curious about these things, you see patterns begin to emerge.

Every parent, every aunt or uncle, every grandparent, and in fact anyone who has anything to do with young people today is anxious about one thing: anxiety. It seems it’s on the rise. It is on the rise. Each semester I have more and more students with depression, obsessive compulsive disorder, some form of autism, borderline personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder and what I’m going to call Terror About The Future. All of these conditions cause anxiety.