Loss Grief Research Articles

The unique experience of spouses in early-onset dementia.

To date, few studies have examined the experience of spouse caregivers living with a person with early-onset dementia. Moreover, few support resources are offered to these family caregivers and fewer are still tailored to their unique trajectory. The aim of this qualitative study was to document the lived experience of spouse caregivers of young patients in order to inform the development of professional support tailored to their reality. A sample of 12 spouses of persons diagnosed with dementia before the age of 65 participated in semistructured interviews. Six themes emerged from their caregiver trajectories, namely, difficulty managing behavioral and psychological symptoms, long quest for diagnosis, nondisclosure to others and denial of diagnosis, grief for loss of spouse and midlife projects, difficulty juggling unexpected role and daily life responsibilities, and difficulty planning for future. Results open up innovative avenues for the development of interventions geared to facilitating role transition for these spouse caregivers.

개인의 상실감이 디지털 컨텐츠 선호에 미치는 영향에 대한 탐색적 연구

The adjustment of negative emotions in later life is related to the quality of life and life satisfaction. any studies have examined how to control the negative emotions in related to physical, psychological, and social relationships. As the digital media and contents positively influence elder's mental and somatic well-being, it is significant to examine this problem from IT usage, especially the selection of digital contents. This study validated the theoretical study through a qualitative exploratory study comprising both negative emotions and the selection of digital contents, and empirically tested the proposed research model on the older people. The result shows the pattern of linkages between the grief of loss and the pursuit of digital contents. Loss from being parted by death and loss of relations was positively related to the information seeking contents. Economical loss and loss of physical functions was positively related to the innovation seeking contents. Loss of physical functions and Loss from being parted by death was positively related to the emotion seeking contents. And economic loss and loss of relations was positively related to the entertainment seeking contents.

A Shorte Rule of Good Life: A Handbook for the English Mission

None of Robert Southwell's writing illustrates as do the texts of A Shorte Rule of Good Life the conditions under which he wrote and the manner in which his work was transmitted by manuscript copy and printed book. Until recent years it was known only in rare printed copies representing a series of editions issued in rapid succession following Southwell's execution in 1595. The first, issued from Henry Garnet's second secret press in 1596 or 1597, was probably edited by Garnet himself. The volume also contained the first printing of Southwell's Epistle to his Father. There can be little doubt that ‘The Preface to the Reader’ preceding the Rule, though unsigned, was written by Garnet himself when the grief of loss was still raw. This was followed by two more editions from secret presses in England and further editions from Douai and St. Omer. The first commercial printing in London was that of Richard Field for William Barret in 1620, when the text was crudely adapted for English readers with Puritan sympathies in a volume that gathered together verse and prose already established in popularity, although the author was still identified merely as ‘R. S’.

Predicting depressive symptoms and grief after pregnancy loss

Women who experience pregnancy loss are at high risk for depression and grief. We conducted a prospective cohort study to identify antenatal predictors of depressive symptoms and grief following pregnancy loss. Particular emphasis was given to the potential role of religiosity and spirituality. In multivariable linear regression models, depressive symptoms were significantly positively associated with baseline depression score and a history of mental illness. Depression scores were significantly inversely associated with age. Increasing age was also protective against post-pregnancy loss grief, as was participation in organized religious activities. Clinicians should be particularly alert to signs of depression following pregnancy loss in younger women and in women with a history of mental illness during or before pregnancy. The inverse association between religious attendance and grief following pregnancy loss merits further study.

A Preliminary Investigation of Factors Associated With Job Loss Grief

This study investigated relationships among factors hypothesized as related to job loss grief. A summary grief score correlated positively with time since job loss and number of dependents, and negatively with length of notice. Perceived reemployment prospects and income loss related positively to some grief index subscales, as did the condition of living on one's own. Job duration correlated negatively with some grief responses. Implications for counseling and avenues for future research are discussed.

When Does the Responsibility of Our Care End: Bereavement

Shortly before his death in 1995, Kenneth B. Schwartz, a cancer patient at Massachusetts General Hospital, founded the Kenneth B. Schwartz Center. The Schwartz Center is a non-profit organization dedicated to supporting and advancing compassionate health care delivery, which provides hope to the patient, support to caregivers, and sustenance to the healing process. The center sponsors the Schwartz Center Rounds, a monthly multidisciplinary forum where caregivers reflect on important psychosocial issues faced by patients, their families, and their caregivers, and gain insight and support from fellow staff members. Two vignettes are presented of a caregiver's response to the death of a patient, contrasting the extremes of involved compassion for the family and fractured relationships. Grief for loss is an inevitable part of life and a common part of cancer care. Support of the bereaved may be one of the hardest tasks for cancer care professionals, who are confronted with the limits of modern medicine. There is a responsibility to provide grieving families with support and care; care that goes beyond the death. A compassionate response helps both those who suffer and those who care. Complicated and uncomplicated bereavement, grief reactions, resources for bereavement counseling, and the role of condolence letters are reviewed.

When Pain Becomes Unreal

How can the pain suffered by the bereaved in their grief of loss, by victims of political atrocities or by patients in agony, be associated with the unreal? My title: pain becomes unreal, may not only sound dangerously provocative, but also simply counterintuitive. At any rate this title conflicts sharply with a premise that most theories of pain seem to share: pain seems to make us experience what is real.1 No matter whether we deal with mental anguish, bodily agony, or social suffering, we really know we are in pain. Though one cannot feel the pain of another person, pain usually serves as a primary example of what it is to have certainty rather than doubt. Also pains that are clearly detached from physical reality, like phantom pain or neuralgia, appear to us as most certainly real. Therefore a vast majority of philosophers see pain not as a counter-- force to reality, but as a power that ex negativum creates what is most real to us. Even pains that seem to be only destructive, are thought to shape what we see as our reality. The contention that pain destructs, or as Elaine Scarry says, reality, is in fact a mere variation of the prevailing opinion that pain is that which, however negatively, reality.2 Scarry moreover contends that pain unmakes whereas imagination the But, as will be shown, in Scarry's contention there is an underlying premise that she does not examine and which is not yet explored in literature on pain: pain the real subsequently may become a power that itself makes the unreal. Contrary to Scarry's notion, intense physical, mental and social pain as experienced in the cases of political torture and in the atrocities of the Holocaust, may evolve into a force that, like imagination, drives us into creating that which appears to us as fiction. It is the purpose of this essay to explore this premise. The title when pain becomes unreal is the expression of pain being a force that can make our most intense state of experience become fictive. As will become clear, this title does not render harmless the excruciating pain of, for instance, victims of political atrocities, but on the contrary underlines the abhorrent effect of the like. The comparison of notions of pain like those of Martin Heidegger, notorious for his involvement in Nazi-politics, and Elie Wiesel, a victim of these politics, is not meant to provoke, but rather to critically show the very limitations of a most profound philosophical concept of pain conveying reality. In the first part of this essay I shall examine Martin Heidegger's notion of pain as an example of the contention that pain is a force making reality. The second and third parts consist of an analysis of extreme pain related to political torture and the Holocaust. In the second part, Scarry's view of the pain of torture, reality, will be discussed. In the third, and most important part, I shall analyze Eli Wiesel's Night, a report of his experience in a concentration camp, so as to explore the underlying premise that pain unmaking reality itself might subsequently become a power making the unreal.3 Making Reality Throughout the history of Western philosophy pain is in different ways associated with a destructive power, one that, as Elaine Scarry puts it, unmakes the world (25ff.). But a majority of philosophers, particularly pessimists like Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, see pain not as a counter-force to reality, but the very power of that which creates reality. For Nietzsche, for instance, pain is the major condition of creation: all becoming and growing, that exceeds the present and guarantees the future.4 Pain is no negative force, but represents an affirmative power. Like suffering renders birth, pain is a force creating reality.5 When pain is seen as a creating or making power, one ascribes to pain agency: pain is no passive sensational or perceptual reaction to stimulation, but is itself a doing agent. …

Grief and AIDS: surviving catastrophic multiple loss.

This article explores the issues of grief brought about by the AIDS epidemic. As people affected by the epidemic experience multiple deaths in both their personal and professional lives, the parallel epidemic of grief is reaching crisis proportions. Traditional grief responses are compared with multiple loss grief and appropriate clinical interventions are explored. The phenomena of trauma, survivor guilt, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and other historic examples of multiple loss (holocausts) are examined. The existential questions of how to hold hope as we live in an "abyss of trauma, death and grief" concludes this article.

Complicated grief and bereavement-related depression as distinct disorders: preliminary empirical validation in elderly bereaved spouses.

This study sought to determine whether a set of symptoms interpreted as complicated grief could be identified and distinguished from bereavement-related depression and whether the presence of complicated grief would predict enduring functional impairments. Data were derived from a study group of 82 recently widowed elderly individuals recruited for an investigation of physiological changes in bereaved persons. Baseline data were collected 3-6 months after the deaths of the subjects' spouses, and follow-up data were collected from 56 of the subjects 18 months after the baseline assessments. Candidate items for assessing complicated grief came from a variety of scales used to evaluate emotional functioning (e.g., the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, the Brief Symptom Inventory). The outcome variables measured were global functioning, medical illness burden, sleep, mood, self-esteem, and anxiety. A principal-components analysis conducted on intake data (N = 82) revealed a complicated grief factor and a bereavement-depression factor. Seven symptoms constituted complicated grief: searching, yearning, preoccupation with thoughts of the deceased, crying, disbelief regarding the death, feeling stunned by the death, and lack of acceptance of the death. Baseline complicated grief scores were significantly associated with impairments in global functioning, mood, sleep, and self-esteem in the 56 subjects available for follow-up. The symptoms of complicated grief may be distinct from depressive symptoms and appear to be associated with enduring functional impairments. The symptoms of complicated grief, therefore, appear to define a unique disorder deserving of specialized treatment.