Forget the "Five Stages": Ask the Five Questions of Grief.

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has inflicted widespread loss, most notably as the result of over 1 million deaths; however, we are also mourning lost jobs, relationships, schooling, security, rituals of transition (e.g., graduations, marriages, funerals), and a sense of security. Now more than ever, social workers must be prepared to assist grievers compassionately and competently. Grief scholars, theorists, and well-attuned practitioners regard Kübler-Ross’s “five stages of grief” as misinformation with negative effects (Stroebe et al., 2017). In her original work, Kübler-Ross (1969) described the experiences of dying people as a trajectory, not stages. In a book copyrighted after her death (Kübler-Ross & Kessler, 2005), her ideas were transformed into stages for understanding and treating grief. Although research on grief has consistently found the model to be empirically inaccurate and misleading (see Wortman and Silver’s [1989] critique, the Institute of Medicine’s review [Osterweis et al., 1984], the Center for the Advancement of Health’s Report on Bereavement and Grief Research [Genevro et al., 2004], and O’Connor’s [2019] recent discussion), the stages of grief theory remains appealing to some clinicians and has a tenacious hold on popular thinking. Stroebe et al. (2017) draw on myriad research findings to demonstrate how it lacks theoretical depth, conceptual consistency, and empirical support, and has “devastating consequences” for grievers to whom it is applied. In this Commentary, I suggest an alternate approach.