What happens when everyone needs ‘support’ and no one is left to give it?

[HereBeFuckery]

Fair warning: I may well be BU.

The last five threads I have opened have contained variations on the phrase ‘I need support to/with/for’ or ‘there isn’t enough support for parents/families etc’

I genuinely feel that there is an epidemic of ‘needing support’. If everyone needs support, who is going to be left to actually give that support? It can’t be endless! If every child needs personalised support in school, and every adult needs support in the workplace, we are, surely, just marking time until everything implodes. Can no one just cope any more?

on top of this we are building a culture that is hostile to immigrants, and to young people generally.

I definitely think that for things like ADHD and autism in adults, there's value in diagnosis - knowing what makes you tick and behave differently is huge - but over the past few years (probably since covid), I've seen lots of people say they need to stop working etc because of ADHD.

I was diagnosed just before the big explosion of it, 10 years ago, and I don't remember anyone at the time being like "just diagnosed, time to stop working". That said, I had a prescription for medication on the NHS issued at my appointment, which was a month after referral - when the process is taking years and medication is subject to a huge waiting list, I can imagine that people have built it up massively in their heads and it can lead to that learned helplessness.

I don't think the answer is "don't give out ADHD diagnoses", because a diagnosis answers lots of questions. I think it's what comes next - easier access to medication and in the meantime, access to courses that specifically cover ADHD in the workplace and changes employees can make to their working practices and environment to make things easier for themselves.

I agree and I think that the support people need is often something quite small like a bit of company and a chat now and then or a small favour rather than some big burden. When these small needs aren't met then the needs can potentially get a lot bigger.

You can both give and receive support though! Surely mutual support is part of the basis of community, friendships and relationships.

I think you have a point. I was raised in a “get on with it family” - unless your leg was hanging off you went to work or school and there was no excuses. State support was seen as deeply shameful and something for people on the bones of their arse or the severely disabled. I’m not saying that approach is right or wrong but there has been a definite mind shift.

There are plenty of people in professions who give support and receive it in their personal life. For example there are lots of SEN parents who get support from others and then decide they are able to offer their knowledge by becoming consultants, counsellors or therapists themselves to support other SEN parents. Support can be passed on.

You have a point. Life has been about survival for centuries, making the best of what you had, starving, fighting, scavenging, we’ve evolved so much that we seek support, warmth, comfort, when a lot of other countries are still fighting to survive every day.
As a society we need to stop overanalysing every feeling and survive. Eat, sleep, earn, stay safe.

Much of the issue is the ridiculous emphasis on exams and qualifications across the board for all DC. It is fuelling issues with stress and anxiety for young people. Then add in remission and extra time afforded to children/young people with diagnoses to get them through the next set of exams. They get a place at uni that wouldn't have been offered 10/20 years ago, but also due to desperation for funding/student fees. Those students then enter another cycle of remission and wellbeing support because the struggling uni's are desperate for good achievement, attendance and NSS results. The undergrads then are led to believe they are entitled to graduate jobs, for which they were never equipped in the first place. Sadly they learn about failure in their 20s - even when support is put in place 20% remission, etc, to do an entry level graduate job, it doesn't work, they know they don't cope as well as others and anxiety spirals.

As a society we need to value: cooks, shop staff, cleaners, carers, beauticians, hairdressers, painters, window cleaners, florists, etc. We used to have resources to cover jobs like tea ladies, filing clerks (still there digitally), daytime cleaners, etc. We don't any more.

Yes I have found that the employees advocating teamwork are those who just want someone else to do their work.

I agree and disagree. I want to live in a society where mutual support is the norm and we all take care of each other, both at individual and societal level.

But at the same time, I think there is a growing mindset of fragility, whereby people don't think they should ever have to be challenged or stretch their comfort zones, and expect the same for their children. I know several people who believe "anxiety" is an experience that needs to be avoided at all costs, rather than part of a spectrum of normal human emotion. I'm thinking of specific people I know, who've decided they are pathologically unable to dig into their own resources and get on with it, and expect those around them to pick up their slack.

I had 1-2-1 support through primary and secondary schools, in both cases it tailed off to 'prepare me for the real world'. At uni I was able to finish my degree with just financial support. Now I've had my career for 20 years and am a higher rate tax payer.

Society needs to invest in people to get the best out of them.

people who recieve support usually pass on support. Yes they’re people who just suck your soul dry and don’t offer support in return but its not as common as the first.

A lot of the "epidemic of needing support" is down to systematic failings of workplaces and educational establishments to build in any flexibility to their expectations of running. More school children need support because the pressure to succeed in school is increasing year on year, while the room for flexibility within the school system is decreasing. The same in the workplace - the demands increase, and the pressure everyone is under increases. Same in society - the pressure to conform to "normal" standards is increasing, the old care nets, such as women not working and unmarried people living at home is decreasing. I'm not saying those things are all bad, but logically when you move the goal posts for "normal" closer together, and you move the hit lines for qualifying for help further apart, you will get a sea of people between the two who neither function in a way the meets the norms of society or qualify for the support society offers for the most vulnerable. Those people then either require kicking beyond the lines to qualify for support, or somehow keeping in the "normal" group.

"As a society we need to value: cooks, shop staff, cleaners, carers, beauticians, hairdressers, painters, window cleaners, florist"

And we used to have council homes so these people could live near their workplaces.

I never ever asked for any support no matter how stressed I was and I went into psychosis and lost every single thing id worked for. I was in elite academia from a background of poverty and trauma

You could equally say housing costs.
20 years ago when you left school or even uni even a basic entry level job you could afford house share rent on, you learnt quick how to budget and pay bills, turn up for work, and you did turn up because the freedom and fun of not being under your parent’s roof was worth the effort.

Now you can work hard, pass exams, get an entry level job and you are still stuck at home. The is no life incentive to push through those barriers because you are still in your childhood bedroom and if you lose your job you won’t be hungry or homeless.

The continued obsession with house value and property prices is a huge contributor to young adult’s feeling of “what is the fucking point” and if you do manage to move out there are fewer people doing the same, and there are rifts in young adult’s friendships when some families can help with house deposits and some can’t.

It is way more complicated than “schools”

Many on MN seem to go mad when that word is mentioned but....resilience! Here I've said it! Because it is the reality of modern life. A complete loss of resilience. Everything is drama, everything is a challenge and everyone is focused on themselves and their needs with little consideration for the impact on others. Labels are floating around like a constant smell in the air. And then when labeled, it becomes a mean to helplessness and reliance on others to adapt rather than learning to adapt themselves with the knowledge on their difficulties.

Eveytime you suggest help that involves the person adapting rather than others adapting to them, the response is systematically 'but you don't understand how hard it is' implying that no one ahold consider attempting anything that is hard. There goes a society lacking resilience.

Life is hard and has always been one way or the other. It is facing and going through what is hard that teaches how to cope. Not avoiding it. Support should be aimed at helping during the journey, not shifting it so one person never gets to do what is hard whilst others have to work twice as hard.

The new diagnosis of anxiety, depression, asd and adhd which are given at much lower level of impact or affect should not be a mean for avoidance. It should be a way to better understand how one should adapt to perform the same task.

What a lot of hyperbole.

A lot of the "support needs" you are referring to are about helping neurodiverse people to function in a neurotypical world without twlling them they are hopeless, stupid and just need to try harder (which is what happened for my generation).

As the neurodiverse brain is better understood and recognised it would be my hope that instead we can reconfigure our world as a whole, in ways that make individual adaptations and supports less necessary.

If "everyone" had these additional needs (which won't happen, the proportion will stabilise as the stigma is removed, as happened with lefthandedness) then the needs would actually be lower because you wouldn't be forcing square pegs into round holes any more. Neuroinclusivity isn't about lowering standards it's about recognising different forms of brilliance and creating space and acceptance for people to work in the way that enables them rather than disables. The years of education are hardest for a neurodiverse individual because we have the ridiculous notion that you can divide young people into groups of 30 who will then all learn the same thing at the same pace from one person. We want this to be possible because it is cheap, and it is cheaper to provide additional support for the small proportion who cannot thrive that way than it is to create a system that would work for everyone. However, if "everyone" (as your hyperbole claims) needed such adjustments then it would be cheaper to restructure the entire system and create something that creates less misery for the neurodiverse. In workplaces, it's the ones where there are rigid requirements that assume people are neurotypical by default where a neurodiverse person needs most adjustments. In workplaces that are already neuroinclusive, the environment is already suitable and fewer accommodations are needed.

I don’t know if you have experience of what getting support in a school environment means… my son has an ASD diagnosis, he is on the SEN register at school, but in reality his extra support just means a few minor adaptations in being in smaller groups at school or sitting on a table with a TA. Not 1-2-1 support. We have been told to expect less support will be available at high school.

I do volunteering with some quite severely affected children with conditions like ASD, epilepsy and Down’s syndrome. Some non-verbal apart from a very few words. And many of the parents do not get extra support when the kids are not of school, aside from the few ad-hoc hours us volunteers do with the kids once to twice a month. In reality most families with disabled kids don’t get much extra support.

We lost support networks for families under the "austerity" project of Cameron, along with approximately half a million people.

It's not just a case of being a giver or a taker. For many if they have the right support, which often just amounts to a bit of flexibility and consideration, they can help others.

I think sometimes when people say they need support they mean they feel overwhelmed and just need someone to listen to them.

"Communities used to be comprised of people who knew each other and would support each other as life happened, now people are less connected."

This is precisely it. We used to be far more deeply enmeshed with one another. Capitalism has given us more materially than we could have dreamt of throughout human history but the marketisation of every facet of human life means that those without means are going to feel the sharp end of this.

We sold our support for the promise of 'freedom'.

It goes back far further than Cameron,who really has nothing to do with this. The reason austerity was a problem is because we rely on the market to provide the basic stuff of human life now. Can't afford it? Can't have it. But we used to have it, when our bonds of care and obligation provided a mutual safety net. Nobody wants interpersonal obligation though so it's now mediated with money.

How many people are going to go to message boards, which were set up originally to be a supportive place for mums, to start a message saying i dont need support with anything and I'm fine.

But as pp said there's plenty of responses offering support too.

As a SEN parent the most supportive people to me are other sen parents. So very often the people needing support are the ones offering support too. Theres a famous sketch of an sen parent who has fallen down a hole, the services that are meant to help are not there/facing away and another sen parent has thier hand out and is pulling them out.

People don't have anything to give. A few years ago my family (parents and siblings) went through difficult stuff. I was struggling to make ends meet, looking for a job, alone with 2 kids and an abusive ex husband. I told them "I'm struggling to keep my head above the water, if I even acknowledge your problems I'll sink, and I have 2 kids who depend on me". I couldn't provide even emotional support.

That's what's happening. Everyone is at breaking point, so they need support but can't provide support.