Ms. Tomsic is director, Pastoral Care and Mission, St. Joseph's Manor, Trumbull, CT. N / / "^^k "^P^ursing homes," 1 once heard it said, "are built on a mountain of unexpressed grief.' The speaker was referring not only to the grief of a res idem facing debilitation .md death but also to the grief of the resident's family and professional caregivers. The speaker went on to describe the psycholo...

Objective: The challenges of grief caused by the COVID-19 epidemic and how to deal with it are serious issues affecting people worldwide, including Iran. Accordingly, the present study aimed to explore the nature of mourning for those who lost their family members during the COVID-19 epidemic and identify the quality of strategies used to cope with it.  Methods: This qualitative study was cond...

BACKGROUND Perinatal grief differs from other types of mourning. Two goals were set: to describe the progression of the process of grief and the symptoms of depression throughout the year following perinatal loss, and to study its association with socio-economic and obstetric factors. METHOD The study involved the participation of 70 women who had suffered a medical termination of pregnancy o...

BACKGROUND Deaths among children are rare, but the effect on family members is profound. Compared with adult deaths, information about grief, recovery, and quality of care is sparse. OBJECTIVES To describe aspects of bereavement for parents who had experienced the death of a child and to compare these aspects by parent sex, type of death, and overall experience. DESIGN In-person interviews ...

BACKGROUND Individuals experience the loss of a spouse in varied ways. There is growing recognition of major depressive disorder and complicated grief as distinct post-bereavement disorders. However, most studies focusing on these different courses of functioning have not examined pre-loss functioning. METHODS We used data from a prospective population based study to examine depression and gr...

It has been widely assumed that emotional avoidance during bereavement leads to either prolonged grief, delayed grief, or delayed somatic symptoms. To test this view, as well as a contrasting adaptive hypothesis, emotional avoidance was measured 6 months after a conjugal loss as negative verbal-autonomic response dissociation (low self-rated negative emotion coupled with heightened cardiovascul...

OBJECTIVE We aimed to explore correlates and predictors of bereavement severity and persistence (triggered by "loss of a loved one"; referent group partner loss) in the Rotterdam cohort. METHOD We used linear regression to examine factors associated with grief severity using a cross-sectional analysis and logistic regression to determine prospective associations. RESULTS Cross-sectionaly, f...

The study was an empirical examination of the relation of personality proneness to "problematic social emotions"--envy (Dispositional Envy Scale), jealousy (Interpersonal Jealousy Scale), and shame and guilt (Personal Feelings Questionnaire-2)--to maternal grief (Perinatal Grief Scale-33) following miscarriage, stillbirth, neonatal death, or infant/child death. The 441 women who participated in...

A total of 39 very experienced clinicians and researchers worldwide responded to a survey consisting of both structured and open-ended questions on complicated grief in children. The questions assessed their opinion on: a) what constitutes complicated grief in children; b) whether to develop a diagnosis for children as suggested for adults and, if so, would adult criteria be sufficient for chil...