Does your current job leave you unsatisfied in the severed limb department? Do you find there’s too little toxic fat in your work day? Are you good at making small children cry? If you’re nodding emphatically along then may I suggest either 1) getting help or 2) a career developing government-funded advertising.

Having watched the anti-smoking ads that are currently clogging up Aussie airwaves, I’m convinced that Australia produces some of the most gruesome social marketing in the world. If you’ve managed to avoid the campaign, which launched last month, then just imagine being buried alive. Picture the horror. Feeling squeamish? Then stop reading now, before the real suffering starts.

While other countries may dabble with grimagery and scary sloganeering, Australia’s public health messaging has a brash panache few markets can match. Paul Fishlock, an expert in the development of health-related social marketing campaigns (and my former boss), agrees: “There have certainly been some hard-hitting, gruesome campaigns done elsewhere, but on balance I don't think any country has done them as intensely and consistently as Australia.”

Take the “hard-hitting” anti-smoking ads that aired in England earlier this year, for example. These featured close-ups of a tumour oozing from a man’s cigarette, an unsightly mutation the Department of Health clearly hoped would traumatise the nation.

Indeed, one spokeswoman from the department told reporters it was expecting complaints from adults that the spot upset children. But despite all this hype, the shock value in the ad is mainly derived from the fact that a perfectly good tea break is ruined by a rogue cigarette. Even the miserable mise-en-scène falls flat. The overcast sky, the general atmosphere of dampened gloom: it’s all just terribly English.

Australia does distress messaging so well that several markets have taken to importing their public awareness campaigns from Oz. In 2009, for example, the New York City department of health used an ad from the Cancer Council Victoria which showed a scared little boy sobbing on a train platform.

“If this is how your child feels after losing you for a minute, just imagine if they lost you for life,” a voiceover intones. While the kid was an actor, his tears were apparently entirely genuine, causing some commentators to dub the spot “atrocious, offensive and irresponsible". In their defence, a spokeswoman from Cancer Council Victoria reassured people that they “didn't do anything dastardly” to make the child cry ... raising the serious question: just how does the government define “dastardly"?

Smoking isn’t the only arena in which Australian advertisers pull out the shock stops. Victoria’s Transport Accident Commission (TAC) is something like the SAS of public advertising, seemingly operating under the motto "who dares to upset the most people, wins the most effectiveness awards". Indeed, a compilation of TAC road crash TV ads over 20 years has become a worldwide YouTube phenomenon. It makes great background viewing if you’re ever in the mood for slitting your wrists.

So is there a method behind all this sadness? Do gruesome images and aggressive yanking of the heartstrings actually get people to change their behaviour? The short and somewhat predictable answer is “that depends”. Fishlock says he looks at hard-hitting messaging not as “shock tactics but as truth tactics". He adds: "Fear is a very powerful motivator but there has to be personal relevance.”

In other words, there’s a big difference between ads that are eye-opening, and ads that prompt you to put your hands over you eyes. Overdo the gruesomeness or the emotional blackmail, and your messaging might backfire. Indeed, one study by the University of Western Australia found that a graphic ad campaign depicting, inter alia, young crystal meth users prostituting themselves and getting raped actually made teenagers four times more likely to approve of using the drug regularly.

While advertising might not yet have had much effect on meth highs, scare campaigns seem to be working when it comes to smoking. Australia has some of the lowest smoking rates in the world—around 16% down from 34% in 1980. While individual campaigns can't take all the credit for this decrease, they have certainly played some part. In any case, they’ve left an impression on me. I haven’t lived in Oz for some years now, but I still get the occasional nightmare with "Authorised by the Australian government, Canberra" tagged on at the end.