Man Starves to Death After Benefits Cut

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3 weeks after late husbands death a letter from social security arrived stating he was too healthy to receive benefits. BTW, his form of leukemia is [or was 20 years ago] considered 100% fatal, and he was NOT in remission.

He had food-related issues... germ phobia, maybe? That would've made it harder for him to find food that he could bring himself to eat--he couldn't go to the food pantry and cut the mold off the bread; he couldn't buy the expired stuff that they sell for cheap. He might have often found himself unable to eat things that his phobia had marked as "dirty", even when there was no actual risk. Even on benefits, someone with that combination of traits would have a harder time than most keeping himself fed; but when he lost benefits, his stress levels increased, he got anxious, started getting shutoff notices, and his coping skills just started shutting down.

It is totally possible for an autistic person's self-care skills to collapse to the point that they cannot feed themselves properly, and this guy had anxiety issues on top of that--anxiety disorders can shut down even neurotypical people; in autistics, losing self-care skills is not uncommon. When they took him off benefits, they essentially took away the only source of food he could reliably access, given his autism and anxiety disorder(s), and he didn't have the resources to solve the problem of how to feed himself; so he starved.

I've had some food-related self-care issues, and I don't have any germ or food-related phobias, or even any taste/texture issues, to make it worse. All I have is executive dysfunction that makes it too easy to fall into a rut of eating the same thing every day. If I had been unlucky enough to have an anxiety disorder or germ-focused OCD, or if I had had strong taste/texture aversion, I very well might have suffered malnutrition during some of the times when it became difficult for me to find enough food. I've done the "cut the mold off the pantry bread" thing; I've picked bugs out of my rice. Those things don't seem too bad when you're hungry. If I'd had the combination of disorders that Mark had, I don't know whether I could've survived those times, at least not without damaging my health.

So you're saying he had help with his food issues and someone was probably buying him food or preparing him food and when he lost his benefits, he lost his support too so he was left alone and neglected. That would make sense how he ate while on them.

I also have an anxiety disorder and I also get worse from stress but I don't have any food phobia. I don't think I would die if this happened to me, I would just turn to my family for help and they would support me and help me through it. I don't have too much pride to refuse help or to not call my mom and talk about my issue because I am so overwhelmed.

Don't all these disabled people have support from their spouses or families? If their benefits were cut, their families would be supporting them now or their partners and paying for them too. That is what some of them are actually doing. Relying on them for support and one of them mentioned in their comments on another website that she had to sell her house when she lost her benefits. So not everyone is dying from this.

Disabled people can be pretty creative when we have to be. We do what we have to do to survive. Some have family support; some don't. I don't, for example; I know better than to ask my mother for help, and my stepfather is nowhere to be found and was abusive anyway. Nowadays, when I really need help, I talk to the support people at my school. Without them, I would probably have lost benefits some time ago, simply because I am no good at filling out forms, answering mail, and making phone calls.

If a disabled person's benefits are cut and their family has to help them, that doesn't necessarily mean they don't need benefits. Most families would be cutting into the kids' college fund, or skimping on retirement, etc., in order to help out a disabled family member. And often times it means that the disabled person can't live on their own, which means losing independence and quite possibly losing any chance they had at ever working.

Many disabled people are disabled because they are elderly. Many disabled elderly people have outlived their parents and spouses.

Some families can easily support a disabled family member; for others, it's a struggle that means that everyone has to do without luxuries or even necessities. If a person doesn't live with someone who can easily support them, that's what disability payments are for--below the poverty line, sure, but theoretically enough to live on. That's why people pay taxes--so that, if someone in the community has a disability and can't support themselves, they'll still have their basic needs cared for. Seems like a pretty good use of tax money to me. Certainly a lot better than spending it on bombs and bullets.

Some of us don't have any family or a spouse. I am as alone as someone can get for example. Fortunately I am able to feed myself and don't need support with that side of things but others are not so lucky.

I do have problems eating a diet based on processed foods, diary and grains though (issues it seems with casein or lactose and gluten in particular as well as MSG, High Fructose Corn Syrup and artificial sweeteners such as Aspartame). As a result my diet is fairly expensive so if my benefits were cut before I were to find suitable employment that I could hold down then I would have trouble affording the foods I need to stay well.

Astonishingly, living on fresh meats, fish, nuts, fruits and vegetables can cost more than living on prepacked junk food...

No wonder the health of the nation is failing!! !! !!

PN when I say unwell I mean physically, I am not referring to my social issues. Those still persist and are what I receive my disability for. My physical symptoms on the other hand were crippling in such a way that up until about 8 or so months ago I was too ill most days to get out of bed due to digestive trouble, fatigue, muscle pain, headaches, dizziness, inability to stay in an upright position, brain fog etc all of which drs put down to anxiety. Well whatever the cause, thank you to the paleo diet, they have disappeared. No more palpitations or numb patches of skin, no physical fatigue, no brain fog, none of the other symptoms listed...except my social difficulties and a little depression (mood symptoms only) as a result.

I suspect my drs were wrong and it was not anxiety making me feel that ill but a dietary issue...hence why changing my diet solved the problem.

The symptoms will start to return if I start eating a gluten, dairy, processed foods based diet though. Ergo, I'd rather starve than go back to eating that crap and feeling like death warmed up as a result of it. So in that respect, at least, I can sort of understand the poor soul this thread refers to, even if our reasons are different.

Not astonishing at all... think about it.

An apple stays fresh for about a month under ideal conditions; a jar of applesauce stays fresh for about two years. A loaf of whole-wheat bread stays fresh for a week; a loaf of processed white bread, about a month. Butter costs more than margarine; milk costs more than artificial coffee creamer.

Fruit, vegetables, meat, whole grains, milk, and other high-nutrient foods tend to spoil quickly, need refrigeration, need more careful handling, and cost more. They also take more time and skill to prepare and require reliable refrigeration to store at home.

Here's a bit of research you can do if you want to learn the patterns:
Go to a calorie-count site, like this one:
http://caloriecount.about.com/foods
Determine the nutritional value of foods--which ones have lots of useful nutrients, and which ones are just empty calories. This site does it for you by giving the different foods a letter grade. Then calculate the cost per calorie for each food. You'll see the patterns... The more a food costs per calorie, the greater the nutrition value tends to be.

But in order to feed themselves, people need about 1400 to 3000 calories per day, depending on body size and activity level, to maintain their energy reserves. If you buy nutritious food, it will cost much more to get the requisite number of calories. If you are too poor to buy nutritious food, you fill up with processed, cheap food--but this leaves you malnourished and craving more. So you eat more in order to fill up your nutrient requirements... but that leaves you eating too many calories, which your body stores as fat.

My health improved most of all when I started eating more high-nutrient foods, especially meat and milk. My mom raised me without a lot of those things, trying to feed me the "perfect diet", which of course was not perfect at all.