A DEPRESSED diabetic died after taking too many pills because of the pressure of cuts to his benefits payments.

Ian Cooper had his benefits switched to universal credit, and was due to face a tribunal after his money was deducted.

The charity shop volunteer who lived in Brighton with his wife took too many prescription tablets, which later left him vomiting through the night.

An inquest into the 44-year-old’s death at Down Terrace ruled he died of misadventure, as coroner Veronica Hamilton-Deeley said there was no doubt he had deliberately taken too many pills, but she didn’t believe he had intended to end his life.

Mr Cooper, also known as Mark, had told his wife Karen Hammond Cooper and her parents that he had taken an overdose at the family home in March this year.

But after they called an ambulance, Mr Cooper told them he had only taken a few pills and would be alright to sleep it off.

After a night of being sick, he stopped breathing in the morning so Mrs Hammond-Cooper called the ambulance again, but it was too late.

At his inquest this week, she said they had originally met via a dating website, and she had gone to live in Merseyside with Mr Cooper’s family.

But after struggling to find work there as a carer, the couple moved to Mrs Hammond-Cooper’s home with her parents and younger brother in Brighton.

She told the coroner that Mr Cooper suffered from depression and with schizophrenia, which prevented him from working.

He would sometimes have darker moods where he threatened suicide, but she would remind him of his grandmother who had lost two sons.

That evening they had also had a row, as Mr Cooper could feel isolated living with his in-law parents, and was short of money because of cuts to his benefits payments.

But he had completed a horticulture course at college, and had worked as a volunteer at charity shops in Brighton.

Mrs Hammond-Cooper said that her husband enjoyed a good relationship with her father, who was undergoing treatment in hospital on the night.

But he had ups and downs, for which he had gone to his GP in the hope of seeing a psychiatrist.

Outside court, Mrs Hammond-Cooper said the psychiatrist should have seen her husband rather than leaving him to the GP.

She said the benefits system weighed heavily upon him, and said that the system had “let him down”.

The coroner said: “I don’t think he intended to take his own life. He was a very vulnerable person. Although 44, he could behave like an angry teenager.”