Purpose Of Review: Climate change poses a serious threat to human health and well-being. Australia is not immune to the public health impacts and continues to be underprepared, putting the population health at risk. However, there is a dearth in knowledge about how the Australian public health system will address the impacts of climate change.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOmega (Westport)
December 2020
The article analyses how potentially conflicting frames of grief and family operate in a number of English funerals. The data come from the 2010 Mass-Observation directive "Going to Funerals" which asked its panel of correspondents to write about the most recent funeral they had attended. In their writings, grief is displayed through conventional understandings of family.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article asks whether disasters that destroy life but leave the material infrastructure relatively intact tend to prompt communal coping focusing on loss, while disasters that destroy significant material infrastructure tend to prompt coping through restoration/rebuilding. After comparing memorials to New Zealand's Christchurch earthquake and Pike River mine disasters, we outline circumstances in which collective restorative endeavor may be grassroots, organized from above, or manipulated, along with limits to effective restoration. We conclude that bereavement literature may need to take restoration more seriously, while disaster literature may need to take loss more seriously.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhere do people feel closest to those they have lost? This article explores how continuing bonds with a deceased person can be rooted in a particular place or places. Some conceptual resources are sketched, namely continuing bonds, place attachment, ancestral places, home, reminder theory, and loss of place. The authors use these concepts to analyze interview material with seven Swedes and five Britons who often thought warmly of the deceased as residing in a particular place and often performing characteristic actions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDespite increasing attention given to dementia by international governments and policy makers, the focus of end of life care has been on the dying trajectory of malignant disease. People with severe dementia have complex physical and psychological needs, yet the disease is not always recognised as terminal. Advance Care Planning involving people with dementia and their families can provide opportunities to discuss and later, initiate timely palliative care.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhile anthropological studies in non-Western societies show how funerals protect the community from the threat of death, sociological studies of British funerals have so far focused on meanings for the private family. The article reports on results from a Mass Observation directive - the first British study to focus specifically on the entire funeral congregation - and shows how attendees experience the contemporary life-centred funeral as a symbolic conquest of death. While the eulogy's accuracy is important, even more so - at least for some - is its authenticity, namely that the speaker has personal knowledge of the deceased.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis article argues as follows: (i) The presence of the dead within a society depends in part on available communication technologies, specifically speech, stone, sculpture, writing, printing, photography and phonography (including the mass media), and most recently the internet. (ii) Each communication technology affords possibilities for the dead to construct and legitimate particular social groups and institutions - from the oral construction of kinship, to the megalithic legitimation of the territorial rights of chiefdoms, to the written word's construction of world religions and nations, to the photographic and phonographic construction of celebrity-based neo-tribalism, and to the digital reconstruction of family and friendship. (iii) Historically, concerns about the dead have on a number of occasions aided the development of new communication technologies - the causal connection between the two can go both ways.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHealth Soc Care Community
November 2017
How to promote compassionate care within public services is a concern in several countries; specifically, some British healthcare scandals highlight poor care for service users who may readily be stigmatised as 'other'. The article therefore aims to understand better the relationship between stigma and compassion. As people bereaved by a drug- or alcohol-related death often experience stigma, the article draws on findings from a major British study, conducted during 2012-2015 by the authors, of people bereaved in this way, in order to see how service provision can be improved.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFEnd of life care in England has recently been framed by two very different discourses. One (connected to advance care planning) promotes personal choice, the other promotes compassionate care; both are prominent in professional, policy and media settings. The article outlines the history of who promoted each discourse from 2008 to early 2015, when, why and how and this was done.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBMJ Support Palliat Care
December 2013
Specialist palliative care, within hospices in particular, has historically led and set the standard for caring for patients at end of life. The focus of this care has been mostly for patients with cancer. More recently, health and social care services have been developing equality of care for all patients approaching end of life.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe sociology of death, dying and bereavement tends to take as its implicit frame either the nation state or a homogenous modernity. Between-nation differences in the management of death and dying are either ignored or untheorized. This article seeks to identify the factors that can explain both similarities and differences in the management of death between different modern western nations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFTwo aspects of the concept of disenfranchised grief are examined: its binary assumption that grief is either enfranchised or disenfranchised; and its emancipatory agenda that grief should not be socially regulated. Focusing on the mourner's relationship to the deceased, we argue that social norms about the legitimacy of bereavement are not binary (yes-no), but are scalar or hierarchical, or even more complex still. We report on a tool for identifying hierarchies of loss, and describe the hierarchy identified by this tool in one British study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHow may communities be mobilised to help someone dying at home? This conceptual article outlines the thinking behind an innovative compassionate community project being developed at Weston-super-Mare, UK. In this project, a health professional mentors the dying person and their carer to identify and match: (a) the tasks that need to be done and (b) the members of their social network who might help with these tasks. Network members may subsequently join a local volunteer force to assist others who are network poor.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe article outlines the issues that the internet presents to death studies. Part 1 describes a range of online practices that may affect dying, the funeral, grief and memorialization, inheritance and archaeology; it also summarizes the kinds of research that have been done in these fields. Part 2 argues that these new online practices have implications for, and may be illuminated by, key concepts in death studies: the sequestration (or separation from everyday life) of death and dying, disenfranchisement of grief, private grief, social death, illness and grief narratives, continuing bonds with the dead, and the presence of the dead in society.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSoc Sci Med
September 2010
In contemporary western societies, dying usually occurs in old age, out of sight in hospitals and institutions; how then do lay people learn what dying is like? Since the 1970s, one source of information in Anglophone societies has come from individuals who have chosen to publicise their dying of cancer. This article examines the most high profile case of this to date in the UK; in 2009, celebrity Jade Goody publicised in tabloid newspapers and celebrity magazines the final weeks of her dying of cervical cancer. What did she and her media say and write about dying? This article examines the print coverage of her final weeks, and four different voices are identified: those of Goody, of journalists, of her publicist, and of photographers, each representing her dying somewhat differently.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe division of labor, together with modern transport systems and certain cultural practices, enables the separation of home and work. This creates a setting for mourning very different from pre-urban societies. Three bereavement theories (reminder theory, dual process oscillation theory, and the importance of groups in the construction of continuing bonds) provide tools for understanding the dynamics of grief when the mourner inhabits two separate worlds, those of home and work.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFOmega (Westport)
September 2007
How do people respond to the grief of parents over the death of their infant child? This article documents the experience of one of the authors, an American married to a Russian whose child died in England. Responses to this death by friends, colleagues and family in the USA, England, and two cities in Russia varied considerably in terms of depth and degree of engagement (emotional engagement, respect, or distance and avoidance). What factors underlie these varied responses? Two are identified, one structural, the other cultural: the strength of the social ties within social networks, and religiosity as historically sedimented within a culture.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe most discussed and analyzed form of deathwork is the dyadic therapist--client relationship, but this far from exhausts the various types of professional work involving the dead. Mediator deathwork is where the professional gleans or constructs information about the dead, edits and polishes it, and publicly presents the edited version in a public rite; this entails a triadic flow of information: the dead--the mediator--public rite. Examples include pathologists, coroners, American funeral directors, funeral celebrants, obituary writers, spiritualist mediums, and museum curators.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIf studying anatomy in medical school promotes clinical detachment, how do lay people respond to the crash course in anatomy they receive on visiting the Körperwelten / Body Worlds exhibition? If late modernity's celebration of the living body makes the dead body problematic, how do visitors respond to the aestheticised dead bodies on display? Through examining the written comments of visitors, the article identifies a number of responses. The chief is an elementary scientific gaze in which obvious interest is shown in anatomical details. But because the exhibits are dry, odourless and anonymous, this does not generate the defence of emotional detachment; indeed, among several emotional responses, are fascination and, for some, awe.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDominated by religion in the past and by medicine in the present: the idea of what constitutes a good death has changed in different cultures and societies throughout history, perhaps nowhere more so than in our globalised, Western cultures. After a period of individualisation, shared experiences with fellow sufferers now seem to be increasing in popularity
View Article and Find Full Text PDFInt J Palliat Nurs
February 2003
This article presents the results of a survey asking British hospice chaplains to describe hospice involvement in post-mortem, funeral and memorial rituals. The findings are followed by discussion and comment from the author, who takes a sociologist's perspective on the issues raised. It was found that many hospices provided rites for the family, both immediately after death and in the year to come, although there were differing views regarding the extent to which other patients should be involved in such rites.
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