Search Results (37)

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly altered the experience of loss and mourning, potentially increasing distress among bereaved individuals. This study aimed to assess this experience and examine the role of spirituality and religiosity in this context. Using a mixed-methods, cross-sectional design, this research employed a sociodemographic questionnaire, the Inventory of Complicated Grief (ICG), the WHO-5 Well-Being Index, the Burdened by Grief and Loss (BGL) scale, and an open-ended question regarding what participants found helpful in their grieving process. Of the 323 responses eligible for quantitative analysis, 225 participants responded to the open-ended question. Notably, 36.84% of the sample scored above 25 on the ICG, indicating significant grief-related distress. Quantitative findings revealed that individuals with spiritual engagement (religious or not) reported lower levels of grief and higher general well-being scores. Qualitative analysis of the open responses highlighted spirituality as the most prominent source of support in coping with grief during the pandemic. Given Brazil’s high mortality rate, a substantial number of people may be experiencing complications in their grieving processes. Healthcare professionals and spiritual/religious care providers should be equipped to offer appropriate support and foster interdisciplinary dialog to assist those bereaved effectively. Full article

This study employs uses and gratifications theory and the news value of celebrity to explore comments from New Zealanders on the news coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, New Zealand’s constitutional Head of State. Twenty-five participants kept a weekly diary of their news consumption and participated in focus groups to discuss their understanding of news. As the focus groups coincided with the media coverage of the Queen’s death, the participants discussed their responses to the news coverage of this event. These comments were classified by the sentiment expressed and analyzed in two age cohorts to explore the cognitive and affective responses of the participants. Overall, the participants over 26 years had more affective responses, and those under 26 years had more cognitive responses. With the older cohort, the participants experienced more media interactions with Queen Elizabeth II and had stronger grief responses and connections to her death, but it was hard to determine the full extent of any parasocial relationships. This paper concludes that uses and gratifications theory and news values can assist in understanding how audiences form connections to celebrities through the news media. In turn, these connections will impact how the news media cover celebrity deaths and the public mourning rituals of audiences. Full article

The 7 October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s ensuing assault in Gaza caused immense public upheaval in Berlin, home of Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora. This article shows how Palestinian families intergenerationally navigate the ensuing losses, protests and school unrests, which took place not just in response to the devastation in Gaza and the West Bank, but also to Germany’s unwavering support for Israel, while suppressing pro-Palestinian voices. For the families, this intensification of the protracted Israeli–Palestinian conflict deepened a state of chronic crises based on traumas, longstanding insecurity and increasing xenophobia in Germany. Drawing from 11 years of ethnographic research in Berlin–Neukölln, I show how events since 7 October drastically changed the neighborhood’s ethos, forcing a communal front of silence. The silence was a reaction to fears of being misrepresented in the media and threats of deportation and school expulsions. Examining prevailing sociopolitical influences, and what happens within families and between generations, I illustrate how families became more insular in their mourning and grief yet found ways to navigate their political views intergenerationally. My argument scrutinizes sociopolitical processes leading to increased polarization and highlights the importance of schools as safe spaces for identity formation and contemplation. Full article

On the morning of 16 April 2014, the passenger ship Sewol capsized off the coast of Jindo, South Korea. The sinking caused three hundred four deaths, including five missing persons, and one hundred seventy-two survivors. The tragedy triggered tremendous grief and loss for the entire nation. Amid national mourning, the politically and ideologically biased discourses of several church leaders exacerbated the sorrow during this challenging period. This study argues that anti-communism is the primary source of their perspective. This study analyzed the anti-communism perspectives of the two churches with political grief. It concluded that the South Korean church has two distinct perspectives on anti-communism that have been consistently reinforced or challenged within their historical, theological, and socio-political aspects. These differences have influenced the formation of the new assumptive worlds of the two churches. Full article

The Dual Process Model of Coping with Bereavement (DPM, by Stroebe and Schut) is a well-known framework in contemporary grief research and counselling. It depicts how mourners oscillate between various tasks and reactions. There is a need to engage more with the intense feelings of loss (Loss-Oriented tasks), but also with other things in life and other parts of the adjustment process after a loss (Restoration-Oriented tasks). This interdisciplinary article applies the framework to ecological grief and extends it to collective levels. While the DPM has been broadened to family dynamics, many subjects of grief are even more collective and require mourning from whole communities or societies. Religious communities can play an important role in this. This article provides a new application called the DPM-EcoSocial and discusses the various tasks named in it, which are ultimately based on the grief researcher Worden’s work. The particularities of ecological grief are discussed, such as the complications caused by guilt dynamics, climate change denial, attribution differences about climate disasters, and nonfinite losses. Grief and grievance are intimately connected in ecological grief, and (religious) communities have important tasks for remembrance, mourning, and witness. The collective processes can lead to meaning reconstruction, transilience, and adversarial growth. Full article

This article focuses on a little-studied short story from Jewish American writer Cynthia Ozick, “What Happened to the Baby?” It explores the narrative elaboration of a distinctly feminine trauma—that of a mother in mourning whose grief is not acknowledged in a patriarchal context. My approach uses close readings and psychoanalytical insights to understand the female protagonist’s voiceless rage. The narrator of the framing narrative is a young woman trying to understand a mysterious family trauma—how little Henrietta, the daughter of her uncle Simon and his ex-wife, Essie, died. The starting point of the story is a distorted version of the accident, told to the narrator by her mother, Lily, and according to which it is Essie’s mistreatment that caused the little girl’s death. Through the narrative, the narrator encourages Essie to tell her own side of the story. In the embedded narrative, the mother reveals that it was in fact the father’s negligence that caused the death of their child. Father and mother subsequently develop differing models of mourning. Simon, a linguist, creates a whole new idiom enabling him to keep commemorating the dead child. In contrast, Essie, the mother, is determined to destroy any discourse that might account for her trauma, and to undermine the father’s very public mourning process. The narrator acts as a kind of therapist, allowing Essie’s discourse on loss to emerge after decades of repression. On the masculine/feminine, father/mother binary axis, I will observe, based on the study of this fascinating short story, that the father’s mourning involves mastering language, while the mother experiences loss through the sheer inability to speak up—at least until the narrator, Vivian, empowers her by giving her a voice. Full article

(1) Background: Brazil has been severely affected by the COVID-19 pandemic, with over 700,000 deaths and, consequently, a drastic increase in the number of bereaved individuals. This study aims to understand the emotional suffering after the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazilian adults whose family members have died due to COVID-19. (2) Methods: A clinical–qualitative, cross-sectional, descriptive–exploratory study with a sample composed of 10 bereaved family members was used. Data collection took place in July 2021 through individual semi-structured interviews conducted via video call. The interviews were fully transcribed and subjected to thematic analysis. The corpus was analyzed based on Parkes’ theory of mourning, in dialog with research conducted in the pandemic context. (3) Results: The results were organized into three categories: Living the anticipation of loss in an unknown world; Living through grief in a changed world; and Glimpsing a new possibility of living. (4) Conclusions: The rupture of the presumed world in times of the pandemic, the impossibility of bidding farewell to deceased loved ones, and low levels of social support hindered the process of mourning during the health crisis. Full article

Zoo professionals and volunteers play essential roles in the wellbeing and conservation of a diverse array of animal species. Despite the growing body of literature revealing the psychological impacts of pet loss, there remains a dearth of information describing the experience of animal loss among those who work in zoo settings. This qualitative study explored the personal experiences of zoo animal loss among volunteers (n = 12), animal care and health professionals (ACHPs) (n = 135), and other zoo staff (n = 35) who participated in a larger mixed-method study. Participants responded to five open-ended questions exploring their most significant zoo animal death loss, where or from whom they found the most support, how the zoo community could better support them, advice for zoo leaders, and other thoughts about their grief and animal-related loss experiences. Using thematic analysis, two key themes were identified: the lasting toll of zoo animal loss and zoo professionals’ and volunteers’ interpersonal experiences. Participants described their experiences with animal transfers and both expected and unexpected deaths. Requests for support focused on better communication, grief resources, and opportunities to recognize and mourn animal losses. These findings suggest that zoo animal loss can negatively impact zoo professionals’ and volunteers’ psychological health. Full article

Background: The social distancing policies adopted during the COVID-19 pandemic forced many individuals to confront their mortality and worry about losing loved ones, making it impossible to say goodbye to them properly. Those not directly experiencing loss were inundated with information about COVID-19-related deaths throughout social media, leading to vicarious grief. This study delved into the long-term effects of direct and vicarious mourning on people’s mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic. Method: A sample of 171 adults (65% female) aged 19–66 years (Mage = 25.8, SD = 8.57) voluntarily participated in an online survey assessing self-reported psychological measures of complicated grief, stress, depression, dispositional neuroticism, trait anxiety, and situational anxiety. Results: MANOVAs revealed that direct mourning experiences had an extremely severe impact on anxiety, stress, and fear of COVID-19, and a moderate effect on those without personal losses. Indeed, participants reporting high media exposure showed higher scores of depression and stress. Conclusions: Findings from the current study displayed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, people engaged more in proximal defenses than distal ones, taking health-protective measures, experiencing increased anxiety levels toward virus infection, and feeling distressed. Additionally, vicarious mourning was more strongly associated with depression due to emotional empathy with others. Full article

Last Chance Tourism (LCT) is an increasingly popular phenomenon whereby tourists seek encounters with vanishing landscapes, cultures, and endangered species. However, there are concerns that it is not sufficiently ecologically informed, has a large carbon footprint, and may put further pressure on vulnerable ecosystems and communities. This review specifically focuses on the Arctic, which is a major global frontier for LCT and is at the forefront of disruptive and accelerating climate change. It draws on theoretical insights from the Ecological Grief concept to chart a new research focus as well as a pathway to share empathy, concern, and sorrow between scientists, communities, and visitors. Key literature sources on LCT and Ecological Grief were selected from major international scientific journals and monographs. The major findings of the study are (i) the Arctic cryosphere is a life-sustaining entity and disruptive changes in its mechanisms currently threaten the unique ecologies and culture of the region and (ii) LCT must be attentive to the emotive accounts of loss and grief associated with cryospheric change and emplace both human and non-human voices in the narrative. These findings are relevant for LCT researchers, tourism planners, and conscious travelers in the Arctic who prioritize destination sustainability. 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

IADC (induced after-death communication) therapy is a grief treatment developed by Botkin that is increasingly being acknowledged for its effectiveness in various countries worldwide. In clinical practice, professionals trained in IADC therapy employ a brief evaluation tool called the IADC Grief Questionnaire (IADC-GQ) to determine whether mourning can be disturbed or stopped, resulting in complicated grief. This preliminary research aimed to establish the psychometric properties of the IADC-GQ. The factor structure was analyzed in a sample consisting of 113 participants undergoing psychological treatment who had endured the loss of a loved one for a minimum of six months. The findings revealed a two-dimensional framework comprising two distinct factors: the “Clinical Score”, encompassing the most distressing elements of grief, and the “Continuing Bond” factor, which is associated with feelings of connection to the departed and thoughts regarding the existence of life after death. The IADC-GQ has the potential to be easily and quickly employed in both research and clinical settings. Moreover, it can qualitatively assist therapists during clinical interviews by highlighting the key areas where the grieving process may encounter obstacles. Full article

Ecological changes evoke many felt losses and types of grief. These affect sustainability efforts in profound ways. Scholarship on the topic is growing, but the relationship between general grief research and ecological grief has received surprisingly little attention. This interdisciplinary article applies theories of grief, loss, and bereavement to ecological grief. Special attention is given to research on “non-death loss” and other broad frameworks of grief. The dynamics related to both local and global ecological grief are discussed. The kinds of potential losses arising from ecological issues are clarified using the frameworks of tangible/intangible loss, ambiguous loss, nonfinite loss and shattered assumptions. Various possible types of ecological grief are illuminated by discussing the frameworks of chronic sorrow and anticipatory grief/mourning. Earlier scholarship on disenfranchised ecological grief is augmented by further distinctions of the various forms it may take. The difficulties in defining complicated or prolonged grief in an ecological context are discussed, and four types of “complicated ecological grief” are explored. On the basis of the findings, three special forms of ecological loss and grief are identified and discussed: transitional loss and grief, lifeworld loss and shattered dreams. The implications of the results for ecological grief scholarship, counselling and coping are briefly discussed. The results can be used by psychological and healthcare professionals and researchers but also by members of the public who wish to reflect on their eco-emotions. They also have implications for policy makers. Full article

The COVID-19 pandemic imposed changes upon the capacity of healthcare systems, with significant repercussions on healthcare provision, particularly at end-of-life. This study aims to analyze the concept map of death unpreparedness due to the COVID-19 pandemic, capturing the relationships among the attributes, antecedents, consequences, and empirical indicators. Walker and Avant’s method was used to guide an analysis of this concept. A literature search was performed systematically, between May 2022 and August 2023, using the following electronic databases on the Elton Bryson Stephens Company (EBSCO) host platform: Medical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System Online (Medline), Psychological Information Database (PsycINFO), Cumulative Index to Nursing and Allied Health Literature (CINAHL) Complete, Cochrane Library, and Nursing and Allied Health Collection. Thirty-four articles were retrieved. The unexpected and unpredictable impositions associated with inexperience and unskillfulness in dealing with COVID-19 configured challenges for healthcare professionals, family/caregivers, and even the dying person. Nine key attributes emerged in three main domains: (1) Individual: (a) disease-related conditions, (b) separation distress, and (c) scarcity of death and grief literacy; (2) Relational: (a) Dying alone, (b) poor communication, and (c) existential issues; and (3) Contextual: (a) disrupted collective mourning and grieving, (b) disrupted compassionate care and, (c) pandemic social stigma. This study contributed a full definition of death unpreparedness in a global pandemic scenario such as COVID-19. In this sense, feeling unprepared or unready for death brought new challenges to the bioecological resources of those affected. It is essential to embrace strategies capable of providing emotional and spiritual support in the dying process and to respect patient wishes. The lessons learned from COVID-19 should be applied to events with a comparable impact to minimize their consequences. 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