If you're directly involved with Social Security's process of disability determination, have you noticed the number of claimants who have suffered the death of a child? I've got no numbers but I've been struck over the years by how frequently this comes up. I'm talking about adult children as well as young children. I'm talking about deaths from disease as well as death in accidents and assaults and death by drug overdose. We all know these deaths occur and that they're tragic but, thank goodness, it's uncommon. Yet, it seems that once a month I'm seeing a case. We all know that these deaths have terrible effects upon families when they do occur. Most of the time it's not psychiatric illness that gets the claimant but a very real physical ailment.
I wish someone would do a study on this.
I don't know how people survived in the bad old days when childhood deaths were so common. My own grandmother was a generally cheerful woman and certainly a wonderful person to me but there always seemed a tinge of sadness about her. I only found out later that she had lost two children to a typhoid epidemic before my father was born and was never quite the same again. (Yes, I'm that old but typhoid epidemics aren't as far back in this country's history as you might think.) I now possess a memorial quilt that she made after these deaths. I'm sure that making that quilt helped with her grief.
9 comments:
We are weak now. Before, people carried on with the burden, physical or mental, they made a life and went forward. Now, well, see responses below.
This is the problem that comes from reading Atlas Shrugged too late in life.
Yes, I was once in a client's house and complimented her on the picture of her three children. It turned out two had been recently murdered, in separate occurrences (one through domestic violence; don't know about the other). That was not the basis of her claim but I understood a little better why she seemed so tense, anxious, and mistrustful.
Many of the demographic variations in mortality resemble the demographic variations in who applies for or receives SSI and/or SSDI, so this makes sense. It goes to show that many people carry burdens that they don't often talk about. Getting disability benefits may solve some problems a person has, but it's not going to take away the traumas and hardships that many claimants have experienced--often for decades before they filed a claim. My relative who got DI in his 60s, for example, had been injured in combat as a young man and had some amount of PTSD. That didn't keep him from working, but when it got layered on to physical issues later in life it made it that much harder for him to adjust or seek accommodations.
Troll alert!!!
4 of my 16 first cousins died young. SIDS, suicide at 17, car crash at 24 and military at 32. The two youngest were from the same aunt and uncle.
People carried on in the past because they had more children. New babies are a joy and a distraction.
Good to see that there are always a few fascists tuning in everyday. Atlas Shrugged more like Mein Kampf and "Work will Set You Free." 10:06 I bet money you are a huge snow flake that cries when you get a personal ouchy!
My experience is the same as yours; I see many parents who have lost children. The other thing I see and would love to see studied is the huge number of female claimants who have been sexually abused as minors. I do believe it is over 50% of the female claimants I see.
The trauma, stress, and pain from losing a child must be a horrible burden to bear - I do think that a "broken heart" has the potential to cause physical damage.
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