David E. Balk

Bereavement and spiritual change.

The thesis of this article is that bereavement is a life crisis that challenges ones assumptions about human existence and provides the grounds for spiritual change. Construing a new understanding of the meaning of human existence and revising assumptions about ones place in the universe is a singular form that indicates spiritual change at work. Three aspects must be present for a life crisis to produce spiritual change: The situation must create a psychological imbalance or disequilibrium that resists readily being stabilized; there must be time for reflection; and the persons life must forever afterwards be colored by the crisis. The premise of this article links spiritual change to what J.W. Fowler (1981) termed transformed faith consciousness and argues that the dual process model of coping with loss (M.S. Stroebe & H. Schut, 1995; M.S. Stroebe, H. Schut, & W.A. Stroebe, 1995; M.S. Stroebe, H. Schut, & J. Van Den Bout, 1994) provides a means to understand how dealing with grief can evoke spiritual change. Some brief case examples are used to examine the thesis that bereavement triggers spiritual change.

College student bereavement, scholarship, and the university: a call for university engagement.

The prevalence of bereavement among traditional-aged college students should impel universities to assist bereaved students on their campuses. Dealing with bereavement can not only challenge a college students completing the developmental tasks that our society sets for the later adolescent years, but also imperil the students remaining in school and graduating. It is in the best interests of the university to develop and implement a variety of effective interventions to assist bereaved students. The author argues that universities are communities devoted to scholarly endeavors and should explicitly incorporate the dimension of compassion and caring. An abbreviated case study is used to illustrate the situations in which one grieving student found herself when she returned to school following the death of her father. A call is made for greater university engagement by forming a university-based bereavement center to coordinate and conduct coherent inquiry that fulfills the scholarly functions of discovery, application, and instruction. Four specific actions for a bereavement center are to train nonbereaved students to provide peer support, to provide structured interventions for college students at risk of bereavement complications, to raise consciousness about bereavement on the university campus, and to conduct research into various bereavement populations and bereavement topics.

Prevalence and severity of college student bereavement examined in a randomly selected sample.

The authors used stratified random sampling to assess the prevalence and severity of bereavement in college undergraduates, providing an advance over findings that emerge from convenience sampling methods or from anecdotal observations. Prior research using convenience sampling indicated that 22% to 30% of college students are within 12 months of having experienced the death of a family member or friend. Using an ethnically diverse sample from a private, Midwestern university, 118 randomly selected students answered demographic and life experience questions and indicated whether a family member or friend had died within the last 24 months. Those who reported experiencing such a loss also completed the PG-13, a questionnaire used to assess prolonged grief disorder. Results indicated that 30% of the sample was within 12 months of experiencing a loss and 39% was within 24 months of experiencing a loss. Two of the students bereaved at 12 months (1.7% of the sample) were classified as having prolonged grief disorder. A limiting factor in this study is the homogeneity of the sample in terms of geographic location and religious preference. The authors concluded that a significant portion of college students are bereaved at any given time, confirmed previous estimates of the prevalence rate, and noted university assistance may be needed to prevent academic decline.

RECOVERY FOLLOWING BEREAVEMENT: AN EXAMINATION OF THE CONCEPT

Herman Feifel noted that appropriate attention to ones mourning and grieving allowed the dead to die and the bereaved “to redefine and reintegrate oneself into life” (H. Feifel, 1977, p. 9). The author takes this central focus on bereavement outcomes as the springboard for an examination of the concept recovery following bereavement. He examines the meanings of the terms recover and bereavement and considers the centrality of concepts from life span human development, the life crisis literature, and existential phenomenology for defining the full possibilities of the concept of recovery following bereavement. Seminal ideas from Alexander Leighton and Thomas Attig are examined for their power to provide operational definitions for Feifels idea about redefining and reintegrating oneself into life as the full meaning of the concept recovery following bereavement.

Strengthening Grief Support for Adolescents Coping with a Peer's Death.

This article offers suggestions for strengthening school-based grief support following an adolescent’s death. Such interventions must be considered within the context of: (a) development during adolescence; (b) the role of peers in adolescent development; and (c) the fact that an adolescent peer’s death is a non-normative life crisis in developed countries. Review of those three topics leads to an overview of death during adolescence; an exploration of adolescent bereavement, grief, and mourning; consideration of disenfranchised grief in relation to an adolescent peer’s death; and an integration of this foundational knowledge in supporting bereaved adolescents within a school setting.

Bridging the Gap between Research and Practice in Bereavement: Report from the Center for the Advancement of Health.

ABSTRACT This article discusses issues in bridging the gap between research and practice in the field of bereavement. A conceptual framework is developed that emphasizes that the gulf reflects the lack of exchange and mutual influence between researchers and practitioners. Studies are presented using qualitative and quantitative methods to gain a better understanding of the nature of the gap between research and practice in bereavement. Finally recommendations are made for practitioners, researchers, and organizations to take steps toward more thoroughly integrating bereavement research and practice for the advancement of both.

A Modest Proposal About Bereavement and Recovery

The author argues that the term recovery aptly describes the trajectory following the bereavement of most persons. While the term resilience has gained ascendancy in the thanatology literature and the term recovery has been dismissed as inappropriate to denote responses over time to being bereaved, the irony is that all dictionaries of the English language, other than specialized dictionaries in such fields as psychology, define resilience as ability to recover quickly from a misfortune. The author argues that recovery denotes the possibility of transforming change following a major life crisis, and wonders how such an outcome would be possible for those whose response to bereavement is marked by resiliency. The authors research with bereaved teenagers and college students has demonstrated that in many of the cases there were manifestations of transforming change along spiritual, cognitive, emotional, and interpersonal lines. These changes are captured by what the author calls the reflexive meaning of the word recovery. In a final comment the author accepts that another word than recovery may unambiguously designate the transforming change that many persons experience following bereavement. But, of course, we need to find that word, and if recovery does not suffice, then how can resilience, a term that means quick recovery following misfortune?

Dealing with dying, death, and grief during adolescence

1. Adolescent Development and Serious Life Crises 2. Adolescent Development: Physical, Cognitive, and Personal Changes 3. Ecological Niches for Adolescents: Family, Peers, School, Media, and Gangs 4. Coping Responses of Adolescents 5. Principal Causes of Death during Adolescence: Accidents, Murder, Suicide 6. Chronic, Life-Threatening Disease and Terminal Illness during Adolescence 7. Trauma 8. Bereavement 9. Bereavement, Grief, and Mourning during Adolescence 10. Interventions 11. Beyond Websites: The Relevance of the Internet and Technology for Adolescents Coping with Illness and Loss 12. Some Final Thoughts

Bereavement rituals in the Muscogee Creek tribe.

A qualitative, collective case study explores bereavement rituals in the Muscogee Creek tribe. Data from interviews with 27 participants, all adult members of the tribe, revealed consensus on participation in certain bereavement rituals. Common rituals included (a) conducting a wake service the night before burial; (b) never leaving the body alone before burial; (c) enclosing personal items and food in the casket; (d) digging graves by hand; (e) each individual throwing a handful of dirt into the grave before covering, called giving a “farewell handshake”; (f) covering the grave completely by hand; (g) building a house over the grave; (h) waiting 4 days before burial; (i) using medicine/purification; and (j) adhering to socialized mourning period. Cultural values of family, community, religion, importance of the number 4, Indian medicine, and the meaning of death contributed to the development of these rituals.

A Shot Across the Bow

George A. Bonanno is Professor of Clinical Psychology and Chair of the Department of Counseling and Clinical Psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. His research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. Among his many publications is Emotions: Current Issues and Future Directions, which he co-edited with Tracy J. Mayne (Guilford, 2001). David E. Balk is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Thanatology in the Department of Health and Nutrition Sciences at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. His publications include Children’s Encounters with Death, Bereavement, and Coping, co-edited with Charles A. Corr and published in 2010 by Springer Publishing Company.