Girls Using Walking Sticks

[Arran2024]

I saw a post about this on X this morning. Apparently it is a trend.

Anyway, I went into town this afternoon and sure enough, I saw a number of young women with walking sticks. None of them looked like they were leaning hard on their stick, just kind of walking along like it was a big umbrella.

Is anyone else seeing this?

What a bloody marvellous post. 👏👏👏

Dd thinks the same. She’s had clots in her lungs which first occurred a few weeks after the vaccine. No risk factors at all and was 21yo. But again it’s something you don’t like talking about because it makes you sound like a crazy conspiracy theorist 😆

And the girls I'm thinking of aren't necessarily pretending to be disabled in a cynical way. They're often sad, anxious, alienated, spending too much time online, ruminating on their worries, looking for labels for their alienation, because if you can label it, maybe you can control it. And if loneliness is a problem, they can bond with others who've labelled their situation the same way.

Another fantastic post and this paragraph above absolutely encapsulates perfectly what I believe we are looking at here.

Thank you. I’m beginning to wonder if it’s in our tap water. One of the cats has a rare autoimmune disease too. 😮🙈. She actually has the same autoimmune illness as dh which is bonkers as it’s meant to be a 2 in a million illness for people. Not sure if it’s more common in cats than that but the vet said it was not common for cats. They’re both on the same steroids!

maybe i should dye the cat blue! Though actually shes a pedigree and her papers say shes lilac 🤣🤣🤣

I don't want to sound too much like Bobby Kennedy, because he's a bit of a crazy man...

But I think someone needs to be asking questions about chronic illness. And there's such a taboo around vaccines, and at least as big a taboo about asking where the current explosion of allergies has come from, or whether underdiagnosed conditions can become overdiagnosed...

I feel that something has gone badly wrong somewhere, and we can't figure out what it is.

It's more fun to imply everyone's just making it up though I guess.

My transnephew alternates a stick and a wheelchair for this reason. Chronic pain and inflammation since cross-sex hormones.

That’s so sad that people are prepared to physically harm themselves like this.

I absolutely don't think you're making it up.

However I have also worked with many young people who do horrendous things to themselves when in distress. And I worry that this may be the next avenue.

I wonder if "austerity" is another player in the uptick in disability? It's a good many years now since the need for food banks began to be a thing, so a lot of young people have grown up with that, and of course there was a long break during COVID where children living in poverty didn't go to school; did they get anything equivalent to free school meals during that time or were they just left to manage?

The puzzle then would be why girls rather than boys. Are girls more vulnerable to being physically undermined by malnutrition? Or just less likely to tough out mobility issues without using a stick? Or is austerity a red herring and there's no correlation between young stick users and household poverty? I don't have any data that would illuminate this.

I didn't say that, and I have no interest in engaging with someone who will lie so blatantly.

Where have I lied? I am confused.

I wasn't implying you said that . You have misunderstood

I was agreeing with you that a discussion needs to be had that about why there is an uptick in illness and whether it is related to covid and or the vaccines. And it doesn't seem to be happening. Theres been a massive increase in people diagnosed with Myasthenia since the pandemic and again, I think it seems that for some reason it's not really being talked about . And my frustration is that discussion about why there are more ill people (and indeed, hand wringing about rises in benefits claims) doesn't seem to ever get close to a big discussion about the physical impact of COVID on the population

Well it doesn't because the mods have deleted it.

When does it tip over into abusive behaviour? Is fictitious illness by proxy a mental illness or a calculated strategy designed to achieve a particular outcome?

I don't think it's straightforward btw. My girls' birth mother was never prosecuted but she didnt get help either.

( BTW that's not why the children were removed).

I've noticed that too. Usually pretty patterned sticks & not obviously needing an aid.

I think some of it at least comes from breaking down stigma of disability. In the past someone would struggle on rather than be seen using an aid whereas now the stigma has gone & often people will get extra adjustments etc

Are you disabled?

How do you know what disabled people think?

And I might have missed the memo but I'm not sure there is an AGM where all disabled people are what they are going to think.

I wonder if there are any long-term studies on social contagion, especially relating to very young women?

Are there any teachers on here who have worked 30 maybe 40 years in the profession - what might they have observed over those decades? If you're a parent you only have that small window of experience, but teachers who've been around teenagers for that long may have valuable observations to make.

I remember when punk happened; we had a few at school who threw themselves into it. I also remember when eating disorders like anorexia and bulimia nervosa were rife, then self-harming, especially cutting arms. Then later it was all about being gay and non-binary and trans and now we have what appears to be a fad for self-diagnosed chronic illness and neurodiversity.

Casting back to earlier times of girls accusing other women of witchcraft, being lauded for starving themselves to death, being admired for being consumptively beautiful, getting attention for manufacturing poltergeist activity?

Maybe it's just the fashions and the behaviours that change - but it's the same thing that lies beneath; different manifestations and reactions to how generally awful many young women find being a young woman is?

@TheLivelyViper - "... Also 16 million people in the UK (24% of the population are disabled - 26% are women and 22% men). Disabled people have always been pushed out and alienated and this sort of discourse just furthers that..."

But where does that 24% figure come from and what does it actually mean?

If it's the same figure as was discussed on BBC Radio 4's "More or Less" programme on 2nd April this year from the ONS' The family resources survey, then the definition of "disabled" is so broad as to cover such a wide range of conditions and such differing degrees of condition as to make the word "disabled" almost meaningless.

For example if you (1) have a physical or mental health condition that has lasted for, or is likely to last for, 12 months or more, and (2) it reduces your abilty to carry out day to day activities at least a little, then you are disabled.

Under those criteria I could identify myself as "disabled" but I don't think there is any way in which I could reasonably be said to meet what I would term a conventional or a usual more restricted meaning of the word disabled.

Anybody with a long term condition who takes just one day off work as a result of it is "disabled" under that definition and is included in the 24% of "disabled" people. No wonder the figure is so high.

Interestingly, if you look at the number of people claiming "disabilty related benefits", the programme says it's about 10% - 12% of the population, but the number is growing.

The discussion is from about 15 minutes in: More or Less - Is one in four people in the UK disabled? - BBC Sounds

@Manxexile You've added that 'at least a little' yourself. The Equality Act defines disability as a physical or mental health impairment that has a substantial and long-term adverse effect on a person's ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities. Substantial and long-term, not at least a little.

I'm addressing the earlier claim that 24% of people in the UK are "disabled" - where it comes from and what it means. I don't think that that figure is related in any way to any definition in the Equality Act and I haven't claimed it is.

If you listen to the More or Less episode that I linked to you will see that they discuss the claim that 1 in 4 people are disabled. I presume they are talking about the 24% statistic as it would be an amazing coincidence if they weren't.

The programme says that that figure comes from the Family Resources Survey produced by the ONS.

According to More or Less that survey uses two criteria to determine if you are disabled:(1) do you have a physical or mental health condition or illness that has lasted for, or is expected to last for, more than 12 months, and (2) "Do any of your conditions or illnesses reduce your ability to carry out day to day activities (i) yes, a lot (ii) yes, a little (iii) not at all". [My bold for emphasis]

That last bit in italics is a verbatim quote from the programme and I hope you would agree that it is perfectly reasonable to paraphrase (2)(i) and (ii) as "at least a little".

The point I'm trying to make - perhaps not very well - is that the 24% figure seems to be based on questions from the Family Resources Survey where having a long term condition that reduces your ability to carry out day to day activities even just "a little" is sufficient to count as being disabled, whereas under the EA your condition has to have a "substantial and long-term adverse effect on [your] ability to carry out normal day-to-day activities".

The point is that when people start talking about the number of people who are "disabled", you need to know what definition of "disability" is being used as the EA definition is much narrower and more restrictive than that used in the Family Resources survey. [Edit1: and in particular I find it very hard to believe that 24% of the population is disabled to the extent rquired by the Equality Act. The 24% definition is so broad as to be virtually meaning less]

I could consider myself to be disabled under the Family Resources Survey criteria, but I wouldn't have a disability under the EA definition.

Hope that's clearer.

[Edit2: I don't claim any familiarity with the Family Resources Survey. I'm reling on the More or Less programme I linked to]

"meaningless" and "relying" in the two edits I can't edit.

Meaning? It’s not like I’m the only one on the thread here. People can talk all they like.

No one has said that though. You aren't reading what people are saying.

It's about numbers, and patterns. When I went to the concert I wrote about earlier in the thread, filled with young women clearly well into the whole trans and id pol world, I didn't think anything much about the first girl I saw with a cane. It was notable only in that I don't see many 18 year old girls with canes. She did not appear to have any real difficulty with walking, but I am aware that balance issues in particular may find a cane helpful without any real visible difficulty, so I didn't think much of it.

When I saw four others at te same event, that was a differernt story, because that constitutes a pattern. It's not impossible, but statistically unlikely, that I might see five young women all with canes at a concert. All from the same niche style group - what would have been goth a generation ago - and none had any clear reason for needing the cane. Hmm. Odd.

And then over the past few months, I've seen a few other young people. A few girls, and what appeared to be a TIM, all with the same kind of style indicators.

Do I really conclude that there is sudden;y more young people with goth sensibilities needing canes? That seems a poor hypothesis.

Given that this is the same group of young people who seem to be trying on other identities they perceive as marginalised, a stronger hypothesis seems to be that they are doing the same thing with disability. Especially given the prevalence of what seems to be quite spurious tiktokers doing the same thing right now.

Quite a few people have pointed out that this is not about looking at individuals, but what seems to be a trend with notable patterns. It seems like you are deliberately ignoring addressing that element.

Have you seen the news stories recently about the writer of The Salt Path?

Do you hear the sound of hooves and think wildebeest or zebra @Arran2024? Because that's what this is about.

Young people with walking aids? They must be trans or trans adjacent.🙄