They sound older than their years. However, the precociousness of children with psychological problems is neither cute nor enviable. The premature wisdom that these lost innocents have acquired has come at a high price. Most of them suspect that they’re not so much advanced for their age as too far gone.

The haunted voices of these remarkably self-aware children were the centrepiece of Prime Time Investigates: Not Seen, Not Heard (RTE1, Mon), a landmark documentary about the state’s abandonment of young people afflicted by mental ill-health.

With greater awareness of conditions such as bipolar depression, ADHD and schizophrenia, the scale of psychic disturbance among the very young has become increasingly apparent. An estimated one in five Irish children has psychological issues. Juvenile suicide is on the increase.

Yet the services and treatment available for them are hopelessly outdated and underfunded. The few whose disorders are diagnosed are invariably coshed with medication or consigned to adult psychiatric wards.

Childhood behavioural problems do not simply go away; though if you wait long enough, the childhood will. But disturbed children frequently become delinquent adolescents. “We see sad children turn into bad children,” observed one psychologist.

If these youths survive, they can become severely troubled adults, often embarking on paths that lead to violent crime. By then, of course, the state is only too happy to intervene, with money no object when it comes to the building of prisons.

The reporter Paul Murphy lucidly outlined the statistics of this monumental failure. However, it was the case histories, recounted by the children themselves, that widened the eyes and boiled the blood.

There was the suicidal seven-year-old with Asperger’s syndrome, who had spent more than half his life on treatment waiting lists and is now deteriorating fast. There was the psychotic young man who wanders Dublin’s streets, because he has been deemed too dangerous to live with his family or institutional patients. And there was the disturbed 17-year-old, who killed himself while awaiting a psychiatric assessment.

Unrestrained by self-control or aggravated by paranoia, a disturbed child can be the ultimate expression of humanity’s darker side, all our emotional demons rolled into one small package. What was most striking about the featured children, however, was not their mental frailty, but their enduring resilience.

Despite their twitchy demeanour, or the arms scarred like butchers’ chopping blocks from years of self-harm, most of these youngsters seemed to understand precisely the extent to which the odds have been stacked against them.

Their self-knowledge was in stark contrast to the smirking denial of Tim O’Malley, the junior minister responsible for mental health policy, who claimed that health-service psychiatrists enjoy having long waiting lists because “it makes them feel powerful”.

Produced and directed by Maire Kearney, Not Seen, Not Heard was an understated but devastating film. It neither sensationalised the crisis, nor sentimentalised its victims.

Understatement was not the defining feature of Elvis ‘Aran’ Presley (TG4, Sun), a Cogar documentary that sought to determine whether, before the days of the white jumpsuits, the King sported bawneen jumpers. Even for TG4, this was a woolly idea.