Death and Dying Assignment, Essay Example

Introduction

Throughout the development of theoretical and practical psychology, death and dying have been the taboo topics. Professional psychologists either openly ignored the topic or sought to avoid it. However, recent developments in psychology have been marked with the growing interest toward dying and approaches, which could potentially facilitate the process of individual’s transition from life to death. Grief counseling has come to signify the new stage of practical development in death and dying psychology. In the current state of psychology, and given the complexity of symptoms, reactions, and behaviors, which individuals face and display in the state of grief and bereavement, grief counseling can be fairly regarded as the most effective and reliable approach to death and dying in the present day psychology.

For many years, the topic of death and dying in psychology has either been ignored or avoided. Professional psychologists could not realize the importance of dying as the final stage of lifespan. With time, grieving, bereavement, death, and dying have become the critical components of psychology. At present, death and dying in psychology are associated with a complex set of behaviors and emotional reactions under the common term “grieving”. However, it is important to see the difference between those who face the fact of death, and those who must stay with them. These are the two different sides of death and dying in psychology, and present day counseling is about supporting and helping those, who cannot reconcile with the loss of their significant others.

Psychology places special emphasis on the need for individuals to reconcile with death. Through the period of ageing, and in terminal illness, accepting one’s own mortality is one of the major psychological tasks (Woods, Clare & Woods 76). Unfortunately, psychology is less attentive to death in older people, simply because older people are generally believed to be less anxious about the coming death. Simultaneously, individual perceptions about death in older age are influenced by a complex set of factors, including past life regret, future related regret, and meaninglessness of death (Woods, Clare & Woods 77). These, in turn, are also influenced by beliefs about self and the surrounding reality, and predetermine the choice of the coping strategies needed to modify these beliefs and to decrease the level of death anxiety.

While the information about death and dying in older age is rather scarce, psychologists are increasingly interested in the way death and dying works in people with terminal illnesses. This attention is partially justified by the fact that in case of a stroke or circular disease at older age there is no exact boundary between life and death, while those in the state of a terminal illness have a more definite vision of death and undergo more complex psychological changes (Burns 81). Unfortunately, psychologists do not always have a clear understanding of the process and the meaning of death. For example, psychology and health professionals are often reluctant to inform patients about imminent death, but the latter usually want to know the truth, in order to prepare themselves to this transition from life to death and to resolve their problems before they pass away (Burns 81). In this context, the five stages of the dying process proposed by Kulber-Ross represent one of the first salient psychological attempts to look deeper into the nature of death and to understand its mechanism and counseling potential.

Denial is the first stage of the dying process: when informed about the imminent death, individuals refuse to accept the truthfulness of this information; anger as the second stage of dying is about trying to understand why denial does not work and to answer one significant question: “why me?” (Burns 82). Anger is followed by bargaining – it is natural that a person facing death will seek to enter any kind of agreements with medical professionals, counselors, god, etc. just to postpone the inevitable moment of dying (Burns 82). The decision to donate bodies is one of the brightest examples of how bargaining in the dying process works. Needless to say, that neither anger nor bargaining are successful, and as a result, they gradually give place to depression, and finally, acceptance. “Acceptance seems to be a period devoid of feeling. For this reason families need more help and support than patients, who prefer to be left along as their interests gradually diminish” (Burns 83). This is when grief counseling becomes of practical and, actually, critical importance. Because of the inevitability of death and because of one’s inability to postpone it, those who stay by the dying person’s side always need professional psychological support.

The concept of attachment lies at the heart of the normal and complex grieving, through which individuals go upon losing their relatives and significant others. Affective bonds, which develop in the process of maintaining contacts with another person, also lead to the development of instinctive reactions aimed to preserve this bond (Freeman & Ward 217). Death as something, which threatens this bond results in specific grieving behaviors; and the more serious this threat is the more intense these behavioral reactions become. These may range from simple crying and depressed moods up to shock, numbness, preoccupation, hallucinations, and overactivity (Freeman & Ward 218). These behaviors and reactions are so specific, that it is difficult to decide whether any of them are abnormal; it would be fair to say that what is abnormal for one person is absolutely normal for another one. That is why grief counseling requires the detailed understanding of grieving circumstances and their potential complications.

Despite the specificity of grieving reactions, those in grief usually go through ten common experiences, which include shock, emotional release, depression, physical symptoms of distress, anxiety, hostility, guilt, fear, healing through memories, and acceptance (Freeman & Ward 219). In this complicated psychological environment, the major task of grief counseling is to use mourning as the means of confronting death reality and recognizing the fact of the loss; grief counseling also lets individuals experience their grief openly and turns the relationship of presence with the deceased into the relationship of memory (Freeman & Ward 220). These steps lay the foundation for the subsequent development of new self-identity, which must help the individual continue his (her) life without the deceased person.

Unfortunately, recent researches have been marked with the growing suspicion toward grief counseling and its effectiveness. The new pessimistic trends reflected “the strong consensus that has emerged over the past 7 years in the bereavement research community: Grief counseling is at best weakly effective and at worst harmful” (Larson & Hoyt 347). As a result, with the fear that grief counseling does not lead to any positive psychological shifts and can even be counterproductive, practical psychologists were torn between the need to provide support to those in grief and the lack of alternative coping strategies. Although, with time, professionals have come to realize the zero validity of those assumptions, the impact of the misbalanced findings was demoralizing, and dozens of psychologists became skeptical about the value of grief counseling (Larson & Hoyt 353). However, despite those controversies, grief counseling remains the dominant trend in our striving to understand the exact mechanism of death and dying, and to develop effective coping strategies for those, who face the imminent death and those, who have to stay with them.

Conclusion

For many years, death and dying have been the two taboo topics in psychology. Only with time, psychologists have come to realize the importance of death as the final stage of lifespan. In its current state, psychologists seek to look deeper into what death is and how individuals can reconcile with their mortality. Through the prism of different stages of dying and the complexity of bereavement and grieving, grief counseling has become one of the dominant approaches to coping with death and mortality in psychology. Now grief counseling signifies the growing psychologists’ ability to understand and address the most complex aspects of death and dying in different groups of individuals.

Works Cited

Burns, R.B. Essential Psychology: For Students and Professionals in the Health and Social Services. Springer, 1991.

Freeman, S.J. & Ward, S. “Death and Bereavement: What Counselors Should Know.” Journal of Mental Health Counseling, vol. 20, no. 3 (1998): pp. 216-226.

Larson, D.G. & Hoyt, W.T. “What Has Become of Grief Counseling? An Evaluation of the Empirical Foundations of the New Pessimism.” Professional Psychology: Research and Practice, vol. 38, no. 4 (2007): pp. 347-355.

Woods, B., Clare, L. & Woods, R.T. Handbook of the Clinical Psychology of Ageing. Wiley-Interscience, 2008.