I do want to address this post, because it does address a difficult issue and as a result inspire a difficult but necessary conversation.
When we use the term “unpaid carers”, we are more often than not talking about family members.
The post also addresses the question of personal responsibility versus state responsibility. Where does responsibility for our own health and care lie? With ourselves and our families, and/or with the state?
At one end of life, ageing brings illness and dependency. At the other end, childhood diagnoses of ADHD, autism and other SEN increasingly shift responsibility very quickly to the state.
We now live in what feels like a pathological age.
Because we are all expected to be out working, we have transferred the burden of care for our family members in need to the state and expect/need to be paid for it, across the whole spectrum - those genuinely most in need and all the levels in between.
But the reality is that we are not paid — and even if we were, it would not be enough for most families to support themselves financially while also providing full time care for children, elderly parents or disabled relatives. So we can’t and we don’t.
This leads to an individualised and transactional way of living, which impacts on family relationships. Families, when intact, are strong and care for one another, broken families don’t, and the resulting fragmentation contributes directly to the pathologised society we are now living in.
What we are living through is not a welfare problem, but the destruction of the family structure and that is something the state cannot and will not deal with.