Informal caregivers are a significant part of the hospice and palliative care landscape as members of the interdisciplinary care team. Despite this, little is known about the impact this responsibility has on informal caregivers' experiences of grief and bereavement. To address this, a scoping review of the literature was conducted to explore the current state of knowledge toward grief and bereavement of informal caregivers of adult/geriatric patients in the hospice and palliative/end-of-life care realm within North America. Using Arksey and O'Malley's 5-step framework, key electronic health care and social sciences databases (eg, CINAHL, MEDLINE, ProQuest Sociological Abstracts, PsycINFO) alongside gray literature sources were searched and screened against inclusion and exclusion criteria. A thematic content analysis was used to identify key themes. 29 articles met the final inclusion criteria with 3 central themes emerging: (1) mediators of grief, (2) grief experiences, and (3) types of grief. Informal caregivers encounter unique grief and bereavement experiences: The range of psychosocial outcomes, both negative and positive, can be affected by various mediators such as caregiver burden, demographics, disease type of the patient being cared for, etc. Bereavement interventions must be designed with the mediators of grief in mind. Understanding the nuances of informal caregivers' experiences with grief and bereavement will inform and advance practice, policy, and research. Practitioners/clinicians should be further educated on how to properly acknowledge the complexity of grief and bereavement for informal caregivers, specifically paying attention to mediators. Further research needs to consider the role of culture.
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http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/08258597211052269 | DOI Listing |
Omega (Westport)
January 2025
Iranian Research Center on Aging, Department of Aging, University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, Tehran, Iran.
Aging brings physical, psychological, and social changes, often accompanied by significant life events like the death of a loved one. One of the most devastating losses is the death of a child, which profoundly impacts older parents. This scoping review examines 47 studies on the effects of such grief, highlighting increased death anxiety, elevated mortality risk, psychological distress, and the role of social isolation in intensifying grief.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Consult Clin Psychol
January 2025
Department of Clinical Psychology, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University.
Objective: Sudden gains describe large and stable reductions in symptoms between two consecutive treatment sessions and have not yet been investigated in prolonged grief disorder (PGD), a new disorder in the 11th edition of the and text revision of the fifth edition of the characterized by separation distress and accompanying symptoms beyond 6 months of bereavement. The study aimed to examine the occurrence of sudden gains and their relation to treatment outcome and content during cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and supportive counseling for children and adolescents with PGD symptoms.
Method: We used data from 118 patients (50% female; age: = 12.
Disenfranchised grief is a form of grief that remains unacknowledged and unsupported. Building on Doka's foundational concept of disenfranchised grief, the guiding framework for this pilot project was the Knowledge to Action framework. This study is a quantitative cross-sectional web-based survey, which included a validated questionnaire: the Witnessing Disenfranchised Grief Scale.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAm J Hosp Palliat Care
January 2025
Department of Palliative Nursing, Health Sciences, Tohoku University Graduate School of Medicine, Sendai, Japan.
Anticipatory grief is associated with post-bereavement grief; however, reports on the influence of pre-loss depression are limited. Therefore, we investigated the association between the anticipatory grief of family members and post-loss and post-depression grief adjusted for pre-loss depression. This cohort study included the family members of dying patients with cancer.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJ Trauma Stress
January 2025
Department of Clinical Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology, University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.
Following the death of a loved one, both approach behaviors related to the deceased (i.e., engagement with feelings, memories, and/or reminders of the deceased) and the avoidance of reminders of the death are theorized to precipitate severe and persistent grief reactions, termed prolonged grief.
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