To think there will be many more disabled adults in 20 years?

[Walkyrie]

I’m disabled myself, just to put that out there.

It just seems like the number of people with a disability, usually a psychiatric one, is going through the roof.

40% of disability benefit claimants are claiming for mental health related reasons. The number of anxious children and teens on here, and that I know in my own life and family, is really really high. So many schools refusers and kids in need of extra support, special school placements and so on. It seems there are a lot of unemployed young adults living at home who simply don’t have the mental acuity to get a job, live independently, have a life of their own.

3 children in my family are currently school refusing, one we only found out about today but it was not a surprise as she’s always been very anxious and has selective mutism.

My AIBU is, should we be doing something to prepare for what may be a very high number of adults not working in years to come? How will we sustain them all?

ADP isn't paid for those who can't work because of disability. It's paid to those with long term disabilities which cause care and /or mobility needs

That's so impressive, well done! I'm so glad you had that support in place.

I also agree with every other word you say.

We have an aging population and a falling birth rate, plus a lot of young adults who can’t/won’t work.

Thank goodness for immigration bringing working age adults and young families in to boost our economy eh?

I have long term disabilities that cause care and mobility needs. I was still asked to provide a fit note as evidence that I was suffering from certain conditions. I think the fact that I had a triple leg fracture that had to be pinned back together, snapped my ankle and tore ligaments qualified me for the benefits

As I said earlier. I was asked to hand in fit notes as evidence that I was suffering from certain conditions (ptsd in particular) along with evidence of medication and consultants letters. It might not be general practice but they asked me to send them

People 50 years ago didn't have a better work ethic - they just knew that if they worked full-time they wouldn't have to live in a house share.

I’ve literally engaged a handful of times on a specific point that you’ve also responded to me on. If you find that aggressive I won’t respond to you again 🤷‍♀️

I have always worked full time and lived in a house share until I was 33. Had no money for anything - never went out, didn't have "going out" clothes, used to walk miles literally to save a 50p tube fare, lived off vegetables I bought from Croydon market once a week. Managed to save £2,600 eventually for my first deposit on a house. People definitely did have both a different work ethic and different expectations of spending money. 67 now and still working full time.

Yep.

and where would it end? Could medical professionals decide that a child's life isn't worth saving at 1, 5, 7, 12, 16 too because they may be disabled as a result?

My son became disabled at the age of 8 due to surviving from complications of an illness which he wasn't expected to survive and the only reason he did survive is because every medical professional he came across didn't give up on him. I was warned it wasn't likely he'd survive but I was also told that they would try their best and I believed them.

I couldn't imagine living in a world where you hand over your critically ill child to someone who would think 'eh, they'll probably be disabled if they survived anyway, lets not bother'.

If we're making sweeping judgements about the work ethics of younger people, can we do the same about older age groups? or is that ageism?

There are people my age or slightly older (I'm in my late 50s) who didn't work for a long time. It used to be easier to claim sickness benefits than now (incapacity benefits) because a sick note would generally cover you I'm not trying to suggest at all that everyone wasn't entitled but I remember going home one night and someone on the bus saying if they take me off it I'll say I've had an eppy (his words) epileptic fit

The all work test wasn't introduced until 1995 I believe

No, they have not. On average each current retiree is extracting over £200k more in welfare and services over their lifetime than they have paid in real-terms in tax over their lifetimes. They have nowhere near covered the cost of the services and welfare which they are demanding as a cohort, and it is working-aged people who are paying the price through sky-high tax rates and all other services such as infrastructure, schools, defence, industrial strategy, local amenities etc being run into the ground with endless real-terms cuts to budgets and, therefore, the continually-falling living standards that result from this because it lowers growth and productivity.

In contrast, for example, the Millennial cohort will pay circa £300k more per person in tax over their lifetime than they receive in welfare and state services, based on current projections: those of working-age now are directly picking up the tab for the largely ungrateful and supremely entitled current cohorot of retirees, and this will be even worse for Gen Z: nothing will improve until a significant proportion of public spending is redirected toward the young and productive investment because raising productivity is the only way to sustainably raise living standards. The longer the denial of this reality continues to lower living standards will fall and the less likely it will become that they will recover (and longer it will take to repair the damage, if it can br done before the doom loop becomes irreversible).

Obviously in the case of neither of the cohorts mentioned is this evenly distributed across the cohort, but the fact remains that the Boomer generation have taken out far more than they contributed as a whole, despite living through the most prosperous time in recorded history. They also degraded/ sold a lot of the country’s infrastructure and managed to run up a huge national debt, just paying the interest on which is now costing almost as much as the education budget and defence budget combined.

Yet many among the most entitled and self-righteous cohort in history refuse to accept these well-evidenced economic facts, cry “ageism” if anybody dares to mention these facts or regale you with personal anecdotes resembling a Four Yorkshireman sketch as though their personal experience negates the nationwide economic data, and are determined to bleed every last drop out of the country despite many of them being perfectly capable of funding their own livings costs, and any suggestion that they should do so is met by deflective whataboutery talking about the small proportion of pensioners who are living in poverty from whom nobody is suggesting removing support.

The most tiresome part of their delusions is the continual attempts to blame those of working age and call them “lazy” (even though working-age welfare as a percentage of tax revenue has been relatively static for 50 years and workforce participation is at an all-time high) or even blame disabled children for the economic problems of the country which this cohort created and of which everyone else is now suffering the effects. It’s sometimes difficult to ascertain whether such people (and it’s not all of the cohort, obviously: NABALT 😁, just the particular segment of them I have described) are so ignorant that they genuinely believe their assertions that are completely detached from publicly available economic data, or whether they are aware of these basic economic facts and are deliberately being disingenuous and desperately trying to blame everyone else for the mess they have created.

Remember some of them started work at 16 or younger even.

That doesn’t change the economic facts stated above.

I am in my 40s and I started work at 13, worked full time AND studied from 16 onwards. This is irrelevant to whether a cohort of people is paying/ has paid its way or not. The economic data on this is irrefutable and unchanged by personal anecdotes.

if it doesn’t hurt anyone what’s with you or anyone else ?

Oh that’s always “ageism”, allegedly, even when it is a reference to publicly available economic data produced by the ONS and analysed by the IFS, OECD, etc. 🧐😒🙄

Yes my dgm was a maternity nurse and this happened

If you say so

Actually fewer of them worked than is the case now.

Nope. Economic data proves so.

How very chilling.

welcome to the UK, the best possible country for this outcome. Not being sarcastic. So glad that at least we have still this thing going on here....I am only worried that the money might end one day....

There is little or no evidence to back this up.

It was a long time ago perhaps late 30s onwards but the medical advances were not there

Is this yet another sarcastic post about people with mental health issues getting disability benefits?

I was responding to another poster who was saying a similar thing

different times