To be shocked that over half a million people under the age of 35 are out of work due to long-term sickness

Roughly there's 37.5 Million people that are working age in the UK.

560k is a big number for sure, but in the overall bigger picture of the population and those of working age
560k is barely 1.5% of working age and less than 1% of overall population.

Now if it was nearer to 15% I'd be concerned.

@Octavia64 Gosh, what a nightmare for you both. Hypothroidism is rare in young people, so presumably that's why the GP didn't consider it.
I hope things continue to improve for her

I've been disabled since birth with 3 conditions - didn't get diagnosed until 21, 25 and 26. I've developed more conditions since. I work full time and receive PIP (lower rate mobility).

I don't think either the social model or medical model of disability is fully accurate.

My main disability is Epidermolysis Bullosa which is a genetic skin condition. My skin is fragile and tears and blisters easily, especially on my feet. Now, there are social aspects to this, the more people recognise the difficulties I have walking, the better. The more my reasonable adjustments at work are respected, the better. The more access I have to lifts and public transport (I'm medically unfit to drive), the better.

However, the fact is that I have a faulty gene and my skin does not function as it should. There's only so much society set up can compensate for that. My DH can shower and leave the house 10 minutes later. I can't. When I shower, I have to carefully dry myself to leave my skin intact. I then have to moisturise my feet. I then have to wait 30-60 mins before I can apply the dressings which enable me to walk enough to leave the house. For me, a mix of the social and medical model explains my disability.

Medically speaking, it also doesn't help that people have to wait ages for treatment now. In 2010 I was referred to Rheumatology and seen less than 8 weeks later. A relative was recently referred to Rheumatology with a wait of more than 8 months. Delays to accessing a specialist can cause a disability to worsen, particularly for conditions like rheumatoid arthritis which have the best outcome when patients are diagnosed and start treatment within 3 months of onset. The 8 month wait for my relative to be seen means that 3 month window is long gone.

I suspect long Covid and conditions triggered by Covid will be having an impact too. A colleague in her early 30s caught Covid in 2020 and hasn't been able to work full time since. She was previously very fit and well. She's in no way the only young ish (under 40) person I know who has been floored by Covid.

I'm not sure I can explain per se but I can tell her story.

She started getting ill when she was 13. She had a period of tiredness and pain. It seemed to go away after a bit so we left it.

Then when she was coming up to GCSEs she started experiencing joint pain. We spoke to the GP who said it was probably arthritis and got an NHS referral to (I think) a rheumatologist. He said it was also probably arthritis and started her on painkillers.

They didn't seem to make a difference, and she was increasingly tired and in pain. She struggled to get to sleep and we replaced her bed with an expensive one and redid her bedroom.

Then she had severe stomach pain and we took her to A and E and they said it was the painkillers and so she stopped taking them.

We saw the consultant again who said it wasn't arthritis as if it was it would have responded to the drugs and that he didn't know what it was.

She started A levels but the pain and fatigue continued to get worse. We saw a pain consultant privately and he diagnosed her with fibromyalgia and prescribed SSRIs and painkillers.

Eventually it got so bad she dropped out of school.

The private medical insurance agreed to pay for a second opinion and we took her to an expensive London consultant and told him to run every test he could think of because the insurance would pay for it.

37 page report, three things out of normal range.

The NHS referred her to the me/CFS service as she was now NEET (not in education employment or training) and part of that referral was checking thyroid which again came back out of range.

GP wouldn't do NHS referral to get it treated so we saw a private endocrinologist who started her on thyroxine.

It took a year to titrate to the right dose (at appointments every 2 weeks to start with).

Once on the thyroxine her pain and fatigue started to go. She had been pretty much bedbound for the whole day, so there was a long way to go to get back to normal.

After a couple of years of thyroxine she was well enough to do a part time college course, and then an access to uni and she is now at uni studying physics (she is very bright).

The pain and fatigue have lessened over the years but they are very much still there. She can't walk far and she struggles to concentrate for more than a few hours each day,

It's 4℅ of that age group. Of that number a significant amount will never work because they have ongoing serious health and development issues.

The rest may work at sometime in the future or work again. A friend was out of work for over 25yrs with serious MH issues. He's now back in work full time with successful treatment.

My son at 21 has care needs and is autistic. He's in the number of those out of work but has future work potential.

My friend's son has profound learning and physical disabilities. He will never work.

It's very sad for all the genuine ones but not all are genuine.

My neighbour is 33. Had a job but decided he didn't like having to get up to go to work every day so left it.

When he could he applied for job seekers and then when they pushed him to find work he went to his GP and said he was suffering anxiety and could not leave the house.

He has now been getting benefits for coming up to a year because he supposedly can't work as he can't leave the house. Apart from the obvious fact that he could look for a work at home job, he does actually work cash in hand out of his house 4 or 5 days a week! So getting wages and benefits.

@Octavia64 Please can you explain why hasimoto's would cause you to be in a wheelchair? I have it and am managed on Thyroxine, as are most people, so this is interesting

Mental illness is no different from physical illness.

I am labelled with a lung disease and I may well succumb to it one day. My parents never had an attitude and were never ever judgemental. They encouraged me to fulfil my dreams while accepting my life may be different. They were supportive of my mental health too because it can be hard being young and being unwell. I was given support from professionals to help with that side of things too.

Acting like mental illness is some sort of weakness doesn’t make you a very compassionate person. I am going to take your post with a pinch of salt and assume you’d mean you would encourage and support your son if he were to ever develop a mental illness, even if it limits his employment and life opportunities. We all want the best for our kids and I am sure you are the same. Nobody wants unwell children but if they do become unwell, they need support not judgment.

Hate away…but I think there are a great many lazy-arsed pisstakers. Enabled by a society that’s increasingly willing to find a name and a ‘treatment’ for anything, however minor.

My DS is 23. He has:
ADHD
Tourettes syndrome
visual snow syndrome
long Covid
He had to give up his job due to long Covid.
All if the above impacts his mental health
Its awful as a parent to watch your son struggle through life 😢

It's horrifying. Not because of the economic implications but because so many people are having their young lives blighted.

We really need to improve people's diets and support their mental health. It would probably halve that number in the long term.

Stop cramming people into tiny spaces. Encourage fresh air and exercise (not necessarily competetive team sport). Ensure better access to green spaces. Rebuild communities.

And teach nutrition and basic food prep as part of the national curriculum.

It feels like this is the tainted fruit of austerity combined with the fallout from the pandemic.

I am not quite sure why you are surprised by this?

Being young does not automatically mean healthy.

Some people are born with disabilities, long term health conditions and so on which will limit their ability to work.

Add to that the fact that we have such long waiting time for assessment and treatment and also employers who are still reluctant to hire people with physical or/and mental health issues.

It can be so hard to get a proper diagnosis on the NHS for things like autism for example and conditions like dyslexia are still routinely missed so kids struggle at school without support which is going to impact their education and make it harder to find good employment.

Long Covid also affects younger people.

I hope you did not start this thread with the mindset that those are just 'lazy benefit scroungers' did you?...

The number will be far more, all those supported by families who aren’t claiming benefits but are unable to work (and perhaps too unwell to make a claim would fail anyway 🙄)

Do people also get labelled with a broken leg or succumb to a fracture?

They've lumped together a few things - do you know that most of the increases shown by that that line is autism?

Allergies could be long covid, as could certain newly developed sight and hearing conditions. But without knowing more detail, you can't really tell.

According to the Epilepsy Society, there is an increase (around 55%) on onset of epilepsy (in those who did not have the conditions before) in the first six months after covid (substantially more than after say flu). The overall numbers of those with epilepsy against the size of the total population are not large even after this increase however.

Long covid isn't always recognised and termed as such, because people don't always include it as the cause of eg the rise in immune system issues, muscular skeletal issues, debilitating brain fog etc. For this chart they've clearly used pre-covid definitions (so I expect the rise in muscular skeletal issues might be a long covid consequence.

I'd love to know the fuller story behind the autism/epilepsy/sight/hearing line !

I can believe that. I spent my late twenties struggling with infertility, wearing nappies as I was bleeding so much and dosed up to the eyeballs on pain medication, I ended up with very few friends as my remaining strength went on working. I was always on the verge of getting sacked due my sickness record and I ended up with depression and anxiety due to my life. I used to have panic attacks as I was bleeding through my clothes at work. It took me 15 years to be diagnosed with endometriosis and 3 years on different NHS waiting list. I have severe anxiety and struggle to leave the house. I’m lucky I have my babies otherwise I would have killed myself.

re age 16-34, this chart tells a story not same as what a lot of PP are suggesting. I don't see an obvious group for Long Covid, for instance, and the increase trend in musculo-skeletal is barely discernable.

MH increase has been steady rate since 2014, the trend is consistent for last 10 years.
The big covid-era jump was in allergy-hearing-sight-epilepsy-autism.

Did anyone else know that autism increased suddenly in 2020?

A lot of it is Long Covid, I'm one of those people. Well I'm in the US but I'm still not able to work because of it. I keep trying to tell people Covid is not just a cold. I don't find this shocking at all, it's my daily reality.

I was on Topiramate which is used for certain types of epilepsy and migraine. I had to beg to come off it because of other side effects.

Some people are labelled, and some people do succumb to it. 🤷‍♀️

My husband's health spectacularly failed him at 46, and he has pip. He'd worked hard for 28 years up to this point. He also still lives in hope he'll get better and be able to work again.

For every four genuine pip claimants I know, then I know one faker.

The faker had an addict as a mum, and her teenage years in care. It's hard to explain but she knows how to work the system, and has never had anyone but her look out for herself. She's a single mum and her children love having her around. She does do ironing for people, and has a couple of cleaning jobs on top of pip.

I'm a bit above that age group but it started around 35. The treatment I've received has been absolutely appalling and has 100% contributed to me being significantly more disabled than I need to be. Waiting lists of three years just to get a phone call, discharged by consultants because the cheapest treatment didn't work, treatment in hospital leading to permanent injury, I'm now so phobic of the hospital that the only way I'm going in there is unconscious in an ambulance, and more. Not to mention having to leave my job because my employer refused to make one single adjustment for me whatsoever.

I don't dare try to claim PIP after hearing the horror stories. I just don't have it in me to go through that.

I do a bit of work but it's the odd few hours here and there in an artistic role. Maybe eight hours a month in a good month.

I genuinely don't know where I'd be if things had been different. Possibly still working in my old career. Possibly not bed bound a lot of the time. Possibly not in terrible pain all the time. I try not to think about it.

I'd hazard a guess at a large amount.