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?

I think the poster means that when negative emotions or feelings are at stake, people diagnose themselves/are diagnosed as disabled. Example: It's not' I'm sad because my life is not going the way I like, and I don't seem to be able to do something about it,' but 'I'm depressed, and I must pop a pill and take a year off from work.'

Or 'my child refuses to go to school/ out/ meet friends', he is SEN.

Your post above is full of ableist, ill-informed nonsense.

ad views, lol.

...or the plebby tabloids, ie reform.

elections coming up, what a shit hole this site has become.

It’s extremely difficult to get any support for a child with diagnosed disabilities. The idea that random children whose parents have decided they have disabilities when they do not are being given any help is for the birds.

I can imagine going to the moon, it doesn’t mean I’ve been there.

So no, people in the UK cannot imagine absolute poverty.

There is a reason why certain mental health issues are more prevalent in certain countries, or indeed why some mental health issues only exist in certain countries. People are shaped by the society they live in, the time they live in.

You constantly wanging on that it was harder in 1650, or harder currently in a different country is entirely irrelevant. It doesn’t magically erase the very obvious issues at hand in the UK.

I think taxes really have to go up. The average person goes on 4 holidays a year, 2 of them international, with over half the population going on more than that with some sections of society going on 6, 7 or 8 holidays a year. The idea that everyone is being taxed to death isn't entirely true. We pay more in taxes than previous generations of brits, yes, but still less than in other European countries.

Yep. And Mumsnet does nothing to moderate the not-even-thinly-veiled ableist hate that is now posted on a daily basis under the guise of “I was just wondering innocently about… <insert latest attack on people with autism and ADHD>”.

It’s pathetic and so tiresome because presumably the vast majority of users of the site are not quite so obtuse and clueless that they can’t see right through it.

Fuck off Farage, and Badenoch, and Bridget Philipsson, with your ignorant bile. None of you are fit to hold office given your disgraceful attacks on disabled children, who are the most vulnerable members of our society, not to blame for any of the ways that adults have wrecked our economy, and are the very last group in society at which you should be directing your attacks and attempts to make cuts to the woeful level of support that is available for them currently.

They should all hang their heads in shame, as should all of their deluded acolytes and disciples.

Yes, that's me. I'm 57, I had a stroke last year. I don't qualify for anything beyond a bit of pip & esa because I'm a homeowner (despite the bank actually owning a good bit of it). & I had a small inheritance a few years ago which I was planning to use to supplement my state pension, but I'm now having to live on it. I can't work, I can barely get through the day not working! (the stroke has caused other issues). The future is now looking very different & frankly rather scary.

That’s not true either. Higher earners in the UK pay some of the very highest taxes in the entire world on comparatively meagre levels of earnings, but our middle and lower earnings pay far, far less than their international counterparts. Who exactly are you planning on levying these further taxes upon? The people who are already paying marginal rates of tax of 70% up to over 100%? Or those in lower earnings brackets who pay nowhere near their fair share to have a stable tax system that isn’t top-heavy and precarious like ours?

Alternatively, we could stop spending circa 50% of all tax revenue on the 15% of the population who are over 65 despite them having lived through the most economically privileged time in recorded history, and redirect far more public spending to essential services that have been starved of money to fund this largesse to the elderly, such as education and investment in infrastructure and a proper industrial strategy etc so that future generations have some hope of a decent future and rising productivity. Nothing will change until this redirection of public spending takes place.

By the way, for the economically illiterate among us, the proportion of GDP spent on welfare for working aged people has remained remarkably stable since the 1970s, so if young people are allegedly “lazy” and “lacking resilience” then so were all of the generations before them who are still alive. And workforce participation rates amongst working-aged adults are HIGHER than they were at any point over that period, as well. It is not working-aged people, or disabled children, who are bleeding the country dry.

Yes, I think people lower down the scale need to pay a little more - not vast amounts, but a little more. Marginal tax rates and cliff edges are a massive issue but it's still the case that the majority of the population are having 4 or more holidays a year with multiple foreign holidays. There is a lot of money spent on endless travel that could surely be diverted through taxes to help the growing number of disabled people. I get that working people won't like that but we do have a responsibility to those who aren't able to earn their own incomes and there are growing numbers of disabled people, as evidenced by vast amounts of research (not saying you dispute all or any of this).

Welfare for working aged people is stable, you're right, but they're doing that by giving some people far less than you could possibly live on if you have additional costs relating to disability. Some get less than £1000 a month to live on with some of that having to go towards housing for those not eligible for housing benefit.

How do you propose we spend less on the elderly? We can hardly just let them all die of cancer without treatment like someone upthread suggested.

Why should working people have to pay more taxes to support people that don't work?

FMD

Ok.

Because we have growing rates of disability as evidenced by vast amounts of academic research. There is indisputable evidence for growing rates of many of the biggest disabling conditions that cannot be faked (eg cancer, MS, diabetes etc) while the fact that deaths from despair (overdoses, suicides etc) have risen in line with mental health diagnoses suggests that the majority of these are very real too. Whether we like it or not, those who can work have a responsibility to those that cannot due to their own disabilities or those of the people they are caring for. And those that are unemployed who get an absolute pittance and have to prove they are spending full time hours looking for a job. The fact that there will always be a small number of people who commit benefit fraud isn't what we're talking about. Real disability rates are rising and we are all responsible for helping these people.

We need to change the definition of disability if that is the case. You can't have a greater and great proportion of the population reliant on a smaller and smaller proportion of the population working and paying taxes, as eventually, the system collapses.

They have tightened the rules a number of times - sometimes officially, sometimes unofficially. I presume they will continue to do so. But if people actually can't work, we can't just let them starve. If we could find a way to make the Amazons and Apples of this world, who engage in aggressive tax avoidance, pay their fair share then that would probably solve a lot of problems. They keep making out like this is impossible though even though that seems very hard to believe.

If we could raise enough revenue to materially support all the newly disabled young people to live above the poverty line that would be great, but it doesn't solve the problem of why they're all getting diagnosed and opting out of society in the first place.

The money needs to go into better care, rehabilitation, incentives and supports to heal themselves and get back out into the real world (as much as possible).

If it was a simple choice of work or starve, the vast majority of people would choose to work.

Yes, I can just see them holding prospective employers at gunpoint until they were promised a job. It's really that easy 🙄

Parents (but this is something that's mainly only expected from women) aren't mandated to look after adult children any more than they should be expected to look after their own parents. Perhaps we need to bring back asylums where people with disabilities both mentally, physically and age related can go since care in the community isn't financially sustainable?

If a prenatal test for autism is available in the next ten or twenty years the rates of that will likely drop.

Yes, absolutely. It's hard to see all the wealth in the world being frittered away on silly things when we could be spending it on people's health.

I don't disagree, me and my sisters(between the ages of 32-47) were recently discussing this.
We are healthier than our children! On the whole.
We have all been able to sustain full time jobs and raise families.
Our kids have all sorts of issues and only a few are able to even work full time.
At least 2 are incapable of working.
A few have chronic anxiety, although one is working online.
Maybe, they'll just all have to work online at home, have their own businesses etc
Because what worked for us isn't working for them.

I think many would be forced into things like sex work and crime because of the lack of jobs or their lack of ability to hold down something consistently which is the problem for many disabled people. Many already have been. Some would end up begging on the streets - look at places like India where you can't get benefits and it's not like everyone's managing to work at all - many areas are overflowing with beggars.