Abstract
The systematic removal of death from social life in the West has exposed people living in areas affected by COVID-19 to the risk of being unable to adequately manage the anxiety caused by mortality salience. Death education is a type of intervention that helps people manage their fear of death by offering them effective strategies to deal with loss and anxiety. To that end, a path of death education has been carried out with University students of psychology. The main purpose of the research is to understand how students who participated in the death education course perceive the lockdown experience in light of course teachings. The research was carried out at a University in northern Italy in an area severely affected by COVID-19, during the first year of the pandemic. The group of participants included 38 students, 30 women and 8 men, with an average age of 25.45 years (SD = 7). At the end of the course, the students could respond on an optional basis to the request to comment on the training experience according to what they experienced during the pandemic. A thematic analysis was subsequently carried out on the texts, which made it possible to identify the most relevant thematic areas for the students. The qualitative analyses permitted recognition of three main forms of discovery: the removal of death in contemporary culture; the importance of community, ritual and funeral, and spirituality; and the significance of death education for future health professionals. The texts have highlighted how the removal of these issues exposes people to the risk of being unable to handle extremely painful events such as those related to dying. The results show the positivity of death education pathways conducted at the University level to help students reflect on these issues and manage the related anguish.
Highlights
During the early months of 2020, the Italian health system was forced to grapple with the recent pandemic caused by the spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent sudden increase in death rates, which constituted a huge, and, at least in the last decades, unprecedented, public health concern, and challenge
The present study highlighted how the death education course, conducted during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in Italy, helped students become more aware of the issues addressed through contents and dialogues that encouraged participants to develop their own critical thinking
Since these meanings are usually taken for granted despite a general lack of awareness about the representations of death, the possibility to freely reflect upon and discuss these issues offered by the course rendered it a significant tool to support participants during the confusing and highly dramatic period of the pandemic
Summary
During the early months of 2020, the Italian health system was forced to grapple with the recent pandemic caused by the spread of COVID-19 and the subsequent sudden increase in death rates, which constituted a huge, and, at least in the last decades, unprecedented, public health concern, and challenge. Over the past 35 years, hundreds of empirical studies have confirmed how diverse aspects of human behavior are directly influenced by this, showing the role of proximal defenses, which are cultural constructions that enable people to think of themselves as valuable contributors to a meaningful, significant, and permanent universe, and distal defenses, which help individuals to give sense to the relationships between life and death [2] It is understandable how in a period such as the present one, with a world pandemic of highly contagious nature that is causing an enormous death toll, how mortality salience could become almost impossible to hide, and how the virus plays very important roles in spawning anxiety that could result in critical behaviors and situations. From the TMT point of view, mortality salience caused by the pandemic plays a central role in driving the attitudes and behaviors of most of the population in each country plagued by the virus [3,4,5]
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