Search Results (26)

In October 2023, a Knowledge Exchange Forum was established, bringing together arts therapies staff and students from three different palliative and end-of-life care (PEoLC) settings: St Columba’s Hospice Care in Edinburgh, the Brookdale Department of Geriatrics and Palliative Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital and the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital in New York. Adopting a practice-led approach, the Forum offers a space to unpack questions and challenges that arts therapists face in PEoLC. In this dialogical paper, we outline the development of the Forum and share emerging insights from our cross-cultural discussions. When working in PEoLC settings, arts therapists are commonly required to work across a continuum of care. This continuum extends from individual sessions with patients, families and bereaved carers, to groups and community-oriented initiatives. It often requires a capacity to work flexibly and fluidly with regard to, for example, therapeutic boundaries, consistency of location, and time. Discussion of emerging insights leads to a consideration of their implications for education and practice, and for future directions in professional networking and knowledge exchange. Full article

Background/Objectives: The objective of this research was to analyze the experiences and factors associated with perinatal grief in mothers in the urban context of Santa Cruz de la Sierra, Bolivia. Methods: The sample consisted of seven mothers who experienced a loss during pregnancy up to the second month after the baby’s birth, occurring between 2015 and 2020 in the city of Santa Cruz de la Sierra. The mean age of the mothers was 34.86 years (SD = 3.13), and they belonged to middle or upper-middle socioeconomic levels. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and analyzed using descriptive qualitative analysis. Results: The identified characteristics of perinatal grief were sadness, anger, guilt, emotional numbness, social isolation, and anxiety. Factors contributing to grief processing included support from the partner and family, when they accommodated and respected the mother’s needs. Factors hindering the grieving process included social and cultural environments that often silence and minimize the loss, a history of previous losses, the desire to be pregnant, and the mother’s life expectations and projects focused on motherhood. Conclusions: In conclusion, this research suggests that perinatal losses in the Bolivian context may be influenced by factors such as knowledge of the cause of death, previous loss experiences, and their emotional effects. The limitations of the study include the lack of diversity in participants’ educational and socioeconomic backgrounds and the restriction of the sample to an urban area in Bolivia. Emotional interventions to support these bereaved mothers in those complex moments should be integrated in the Bolivian healthcare system. Full article

Background: In the intensive care unit, many patients are dying despite advanced therapeutic technology and optimized treatment. The critical care team is expected to deliver end-of-life care for the dying patient and their family. However, it is challenging to provide adequate support to families due to the ideas and emotions associated with the end of life. This can be influenced by different beliefs and cultures among patients and healthcare professionals. Added to this, research about end-of-life practices in intensive care units in Saudi Arabia is limited. Therefore, this study protocol aims to examine: (1) What end-of-life care is provided by healthcare teams in adult intensive care units in Saudi Arabia? (2) What helps or hinders effective end-of-life care in adult intensive care units in Saudi Arabia? Method: This study will use a mixed-methods, sequential, explanatory design consisting of two phases. Phase 1 will include a cross-sectional study design with a convenience sample of approximately 400 healthcare providers who will be invited from three military hospitals in Saud Arabia. the Palliative and End-of-Life Care Index (PEOL Care Index) will be used to assess palliative and end-of-life care education, practice, and perceived competence among the staff. Additionally, a questionnaire on the barriers to optimal end-of-life care and the perceived benefit of potential strategies to improve end-of-life care will be applied to obtain the views of managers. Phase 2 of the study will be a qualitative descriptive design involving semi-structured interviews with healthcare providers, managers, and bereaved family members. Conclusion: The study findings will contribute to understanding current practice in relation to palliative and end-of-life care in intensive care units in Saudi Arabia. It will provide valuable insight into barriers to and facilitators of care, which will help to develop strategies and interventions to improve the quality of end-of-life practices in ICUs. In addition, this research will provide significant information regarding family members’ experiences of end-of-life care provided to their relatives. Full article

Despite the increasing prevalence of pet ownership in Chinese societies, standardized tools to assess grief from pet loss remain lacking. Research predominantly focuses on Western populations, creating a gap in understanding pet bereavement in Chinese cultural settings. This study aimed to adapt and validate the Pet Bereavement Questionnaire (PBQ-C) for a Chinese context to create a culturally appropriate assessment tool. A total of 246 participants with companion animal loss experiences were recruited through the university of the research team. They were invited to complete an online survey including the PBQ-C, the Depression subscale of the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-21), and the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG). Both Exploratory Factor Analysis and Confirmatory Factor Analysis were conducted to examine the psychometric properties of the PBQ-C and the findings supported a three-factor structure—grief, anger, and guilt—aligned with the original PBQ, with three items reassigned to different factors. Despite these adjustments, the PBQ-C demonstrated strong internal consistency, reflecting the reliability of the questionnaire in measuring the same construct across its items; split-half reliability, indicating its ability to produce consistent results when divided into two parts; and concurrent validity, showing that the PBQ-C correlates well with other established measures of grief. The validated PBQ-C provides a culturally sensitive tool for assessing pet bereavement in Chinese society that can promote research and counselling support for this under-researched and under-recognized type of loss of human-animal relationships. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly interrupted the grieving experiences of bereaved families and drastically changed their ways of dealing with loss. Our study aims to gain an in-depth understanding of the experience of bereaved relatives of patients who died in palliative care units during the COVID-19 pandemic. The phenomenological research design included sixteen family members of hospitalized palliative patients who died from November 2021 to June 2022. The study involved conducting qualitative in-depth semi-structured interviews with family members 12–24 months after the death of their loved ones. The interviews aimed to gather information about the experiences of the families both before and after the death. The COREQ guidelines were applied in the study. Participants were mainly female (n = 13) with a mean age of 47.25 (SD = 12.58). Data were analysed using the Interpretative Phenomenology Analysis (IPA). The following three categories were identified: (1) navigating loved ones’ final weeks and days (troubled deaths); (2) the last farewell was robbed; (3) looking for adjustment after loss. One overall main theme emerged, which was as follows: “Struggling between stolen moments and painful losses to get back into the flow of life”. This study provides novel insights into end-of-life care and bereavement from the perspectives of family. Our findings suggest that developing and promoting family-centred culture can lead to compassionate palliative care focused on a myriad ways of affirming that their loved one matters. Full article

The suicide rates in Guyana, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago are among the highest in the Americas, containing significant Indo-Caribbean populations that are suggested to be most vulnerable to suicide. This systematic review analyzes the existing literature and identifies knowledge gaps in risk and protective factors against suicide in these countries. The literature search conducted followed PRISMA guidelines using the PubMed and APA PsycInfo databases. The PRISMA flow diagram illustrated that eight scholarly papers were eligible for inclusion. Included literature examined stratified data focused on the aforementioned countries, as well as their Indo-Caribbean adolescent populations. Excluded literature did not mention suicidality, adolescents, Indo-Caribbeans, or the focal countries or was focused on the Jonestown mass murder–suicide event. The studies encompassed 6581 individuals. Identified risk factors include social stigma regarding suicide, mental health resource scarcity, and difficult socioeconomic conditions. The identified protective factors for youth include religious/spiritual practices and group activities. Limitations include database quantity, risk of publication bias, and the small sample for each study. A prevailing social stigma regarding suicide was identified. Greater research is needed relating to effects of suicide legislation, bereavement experiences, sociocultural contexts, geography, migration patterns, and culturally compatible interventions to aid future suicide prevention efforts. The protocol was registered with PROSPERO (CRD42023417494). Full article

This paper explores the influence and significance of the activities of the monks’ militia during the Japanese invasion of Chosŏn, from the perspective of the religious efficacy of Buddhism and the spread of the Buddhist concept of wonder. After examining the concept that the monks’ militia played an important part in the war, fighting against enemies in major battles and constructing and defending fortresses, this paper proposes that the religious efficacy of Buddhism was revealed through the performance of burial and guiding ceremonies. Restoring the religious wonder of Buddhism, which had been criticized by the Confucian literati, Buddhist rituals for consoling the bereaved and praying for the welfare of the dead came to thrive. A dilemma existed between the principle of keeping the Buddhist precepts and the reality of fulfilling the demands of loyalty since the activities of the monks’ militia greatly damaged the Buddhist community. While killing was a direct infringement of the values of the sangha, the monks violated this precept in the cause of protecting the state and practicing loyalty. In this situation, where there was such a dilemma between the Buddhist and secular worlds, these monks’ prioritization of loyalty not only indicated the desperate national situation of the time but also reflected the social, cultural, and political context of the Confucian society of Chosŏn. This paper also explores how renowned generals of the monks’ militia, including Samyŏng Yujŏng, emerged as heroes among the people, and memories of their deeds were transmitted through wonder stories. Yujŏng was highly praised as a symbol of Buddhist loyalty, and his heroic story was expanded and reproduced among the population through folk tales and novels. While the intellectuals of Chosŏn who followed Confucian values did not believe those wonder stories, the trauma that the war left behind demanded the appearance of wondrous heroes who helped people overcome that trauma, and this demand enabled Yujŏng to emerge as one of these heroic figures. The activities of the monks’ militia, the religious efficacy of Buddhism, and the creation of the heroic narratives of the monks’ militia generals prove that Buddhism had a firm foundation in late Chosŏn society. Full article

The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war. Full article

The year 2024 marks one decade of scholarship in the new interdisciplinary field of Digital Death, concerning the study of death, dying and grief in the digital age. This paper addresses one key subfield of Digital Death Studies, here termed Digital Grief Studies, which centres on theory, research and design concerning grief in today’s digitally saturated contexts. It argues that a classic grand pattern in scholarly treatments of grief—Grief Universalism—with a long, problematic history in Grief and Bereavement Studies, is reappearing in Digital Grief Studies. The Continuing Bonds theory of grief and its application in theory, research and design in Digital Grief Studies is used to demonstrate Grief Universalism in action in our field via hypothetical and fictional examples. This builds toward this paper’s big aim: to illustrate what we as an emerging field stand to gain from positioning the established field of Grief and Bereavement Studies as a veritable goldmine of advances—as well as pitfalls, wrong turns, and recurrent problem patterns to be avoided—generated over a hundred years of scholarship concerning human grief. Harnessing this wealth of prior learning and leveraging it toward the furtherance of our field in the coming decade and beyond becomes more crucial as we repel the seemingly perennial magnetism of Grief Universalism, as we operate within an interdisciplinary field vulnerable to Universalism and as yet unaware of its perils, and amid contemporary digital cultures and environments that may preserve and reinforce universalist grief framings. Full article

In the face of death, different ethnic groups have unique coping ways. The physical care and spiritual care for the dying can demonstrate the diversity and particularity of ethnic cultural thought. Taking two villages in the interlaced residential areas inhabited by Han, Tibetan, and Hui ethnic groups in Linxia and Wuwei of Gansu Province as examples, this paper focuses on the presentation and significance of multi-ethnic cultural integration in the process of end-of-life care, with a focus on spiritual care. One main point of this paper is that, although hospice care in the modern medical sense is not really implemented in the vast rural areas of China, local end-of-life care, based on the village medical system and religious rituals, equally plays an important role. This is mainly manifested through the implementation of the Narcotics Card System and the widespread spiritual care. The second main point of this paper is that the form of end-of-life care, which embodies the integration of ethnic cultures, contains a certain degree of nursing functions, while taking into account the spiritual care needed by the dying and the grief consolation needed by the bereaved family. Considering the lack of spiritual care and bereavement management in China’s medical space, the religious approaches to end-of-life care, as delineated in this study, could serve as a source of inspiration for the country’s efforts to integrate hospice services into its healthcare system. In short, compared with Western forms of hospice care, in which modern medicine constitutes the main body, China’s local end-of-life care is more reflected in the diversity and integration of spiritual care for the dying. Full article

The mystery of death, dying and funerals has been a universal phenomenon in the lives of almost all human beings, from humanity’s fall from grace to today. Death visits every culture, clan and family, and yet it continues to be a terrifying, unexpected stranger and the most feared enemy of human beings. People from different cultures use different coping mechanisms to fight off the pain of death, but for some people in the Collins Chabane Municipality, a particular Christian religious belief has been shown to be the most reliable asset during the battle. It is questionable whether alternative traditions besides Christianity can compete with Christianity in bringing healing from the pain of death. Various methods of healing, like African grief therapy and psychological healing, are offered to bereaved family members after death and even after burial, but are they enough for Africans to return to their normal lives? This article discusses why (Christian) religious belief is essential during and after the burial of a loved one. This is carried out within the context of colonialism having eroded all African traditions, creating a space for Christianity alone to be a remedy in death and burying. Full article

Mourning is the state of grieving the loss of a close relationship. It manifests itself in multi-sided suffering affecting the mourner’s mental, physical and spiritual sphere. A particularly painful form of mourning is the family experience of grief. Although ways of expressing grief depend on the culture, era and intensity of the interpersonal relationships, it is a universal human experience. This paper aims to answer the question about the role of the mourner’s faith in Jesus Christ in the bereaved family experience, as a work in the field of Roman Catholic dogmatic theology. The method used is the analysis of selected material from psychology and Catholic theology (Christology, anthropology, protology, eschatology), in order to synthetically present theological and practical conclusions. The author also quotes mourners’ testimonies. First, the author shows the elements of the psychology of mourning. However, his emphasis is on the next step, i.e., discussing the relationship between the mourner’s faith in Jesus and the family experience of grief. Furthermore, he deals with theories concerning the relationships between the living and the dead, which are contrary to the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church: annihilation, spiritism and reincarnation. Finally, the important role of the faith in Jesus in the mourning process is presented and completed by indicating possible directions for research on this issue. Full article

After-death communication (ADC) is the phenomenon of perceiving spontaneous and direct contact by a deceased loved one. Evidence suggests that ADC is a widespread human experience, particularly for bereaved individuals. Many people who have ADCs report them to be comforting, suggesting therapeutic potential. However, many individuals in Western cultures choose not to disclose their ADCs to mental health providers, citing fears of pathologization, disenfranchisement due to gender expectations, negative ADC encounters, or minimization by clinicians. For others, ADCs are deeply personal and people may keep the experiences to themselves for fear that providers might explain the ADCs away by framing them in purely psychological terms. As such, there is a paucity of literature on how therapists should best approach the topic of ADC with clients. The following narrative review offers clinical interview and assessment strategies from theoretical papers and empirical studies to guide this process. Clinicians are encouraged to self-reflect on their natural inclinations around ADC, assess general psychological functioning, normalize and validate the ADC experience, assess client feelings and explanations, and inquire about spiritual beliefs. Clinicians can also help clients to explore the meaning and personal significance of their ADCs as well as clients’ perceived relationships with the deceased. Full article

Research has shown that people bereaved by suicide have an increased risk of mental health problems, suicidality and associated stigma, as well as higher rates of sick leave and increased rates of receiving disability pensions. Peer-led suicide bereavement support groups are perceived to enhance people’s recovery by enabling shared experiences with others who are bereaved in similar circumstances. The aim of the research was to explore the viewpoints of participants living in Denmark and the Republic of Ireland on these peer-led support groups. This study focused on how the participants experienced being part of the peer-led support and how the participation affected them. We conducted four focus groups, two in Denmark and two in the Republic of Ireland, and two individual interviews, involving a total of 27 people bereaved by suicide. Data were analyzed thematically. The participants’ experiences in the peer-led support groups were in contrast to what they had experienced in their daily lives. They felt alienated in daily living, as they believed that people could not comprehend their situation, which in turn led participants to search for people with similar experiences and join the peer-led support groups. While peer-led support groups may not be helpful for everyone, they created ‘supportive spaces’ that potentially affected the participants’ recovery processes, from which we generated three key themes: (i) ‘A transformative space’, describing how the peer-led support group created a place to embrace change, learning and knowledge about suicide and suicide bereavement and the making of new connections; (ii) ‘An alternative space for belonging and grieving’, describing how the participants felt allowed to and could give themselves permission to grieve; and (iii) ‘A conflicted space’ describing how it was troublesome to belong to and participate in the peer-led support groups. In conclusion, despite the two cultural settings and different organizational approaches, the experiences were comparable. Peer-led support groups can, despite being a conflicted space for some, provide supportive spaces aiding the participants’ recovery process. Full article

In this article, I used autoethnography to describe and analyze my experience of being bereaved by suicide and researching spirituality during suicide bereavement. The culture silenced my grief, and this is congruent with the experiences of my research participants. The religious community, in my case, did not help me and added to my spiritual and psychological pain. The silenced parts of my loss started to make sounds, such as psychological disturbances, but also as unconscious and conscious choices, which led to immersing myself in the research of spirituality during suicide bereavement. Research on the topic goes hand in hand with my search for spirituality during suicide bereavement and reviewing my loss. My story suggests that despite the negative experiences with Catholic priests, spirituality during suicide bereavement can become a vital resource to find meaning for the loss and the pain of grief and can take many different and even unexpected forms. Full article