taking anti-psychotic medication prescribed by his psychiatrist. He jumped from a bridge to his death after a risk assessment — by a physiotherapist — that led the DWP to deny his claim for ESA. The department later admitted that its decision was wrong; it said he should have been categorised as being at substantial risk of harm. Epidemiology A study published in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health in November 2015 found an independent correlation between the deployment of the Incapacity Benefit reassessment programme in England and an increase in reported mental health problems, higher levels of antidepressant prescribing and 590 additional suicides. The DWP responded by pointing out that association does not imply causation: the rise in mental health issues when the WCA was deployed after 2010 could have been caused by something else entirely and the temporal association with the reassessment programme could just have been a coincidence. The researchers said they had found no other explanation for the rise. Deaths after WCAs In response to a campaign using the Freedom of Information Act, the Information Commissioner ordered the DWP to disclose the number of people who had died in the 12 months after their WCA since May 2010 – the DWP had sought to withhold this information, arguing variously that it was too time-consuming, the department was about to publish it anyway or it would not be in the public interest because the data might be misinterpreted. But in August 2015, the DWP was forced to reveal that between December 2011 and February 2014, 2,380 claimants had died after being declared fit for work. However, as Dr Ben Goldacre has explained, an imprecise question in the original FOI request and an unhelpful DWP response — which Goldacre characterised as "essentially a PDF and an excel spreadsheet full of red herrings" — meant that no firm conclusion could be drawn from these figures alone about whether the death rate of people found fit for work is any higher or lower than expected. Deaths and claims ending DWP figures show that, between January and November 2011, 10,600 sick and disabled people died within six weeks of their benefit claim ending; many disability campaigners believe that these deaths occurred after — and even because — the claimants were declared fit for work. The Daily Telegraph has questioned this: it posits that the 10,600 deaths include people who happened to