Factors Affecting The Senior Population Losses

Kubler-Ross, E and Kessler, D (2005). On Grief and Grieving, London: Simon & Schuster. p7-28.

Grief is a painful emotion that people experience through troubling times in life, such as losing a loved one. Swiss psychiatrist, Elisabeth Kubler Ross, introduced the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, in the year of 1969. She explains that there is no correct way or time to grieve; the stages are used to familiarize people with the aspects of grief and grieving. Grief can over take someone’s life and lead to a negative downfall, such as Hamlet experiences in Hamlet, written by Williams Shakespeare. He undergoes a variety of barriers throughout the novel, such as his father is murdered, which leads to his downfall-death. Although Hamlet grieves, the denial stage is not present in the novel as it

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross & David Kessler came up with the five stages of grief, which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Although grief is individual depending on the person and the situation, these stages help organize the process of grieving. The stages act more as tools than a timeline. The movie My Girl portrays these stages after the death of Thomas J., Vada’s best and only friend.

Theorists like Lindemann claim that there are five phases that are normal to go through in grieving: somatic disturbance, preoccupation with the deceased, guilt, hostility or anger, and difficulty with everyday tasks. Kubler-Ross identified the commonly recognized and accepted stages of grief

Loss is a phenomenon that is experienced by all. Death is experienced by family members as a unique and elevated form of loss which is modulated by potent stages of grief. Inevitably, everyone will lose someone with whom they had a personal relationship and emotional connection and thus experience an aftermath that can generally be described as grief. Although bereavement, which is defined as a state of sorrow over the death or departure of a loved one, is a universal experience it varies widely across gender, age, and circumstance (definitions.net, 2015). Indeed the formalities and phases associated with bereavement have been recounted and theorized in literature for years. These philosophies are quite diverse but

The five stages of grief are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance (Axelrod, 2017). She stated that

The book, Lament For a Son, written by Nicholas Wolterstorff talks about his pain and grief after losing his 25-year-old son (Joy, 2009). His son died while on a mountain-climbing expedition. Dr. Wolterstorff has several books published during his career as a philosophical theology professor in Yale Divinity. However, he wrote Lament for a Son with a different journal style since it is a personal thing for him. The book is similar to a journal as he narrates the events that happened before and after his son’s death. The emotions expressed in the book are common among people who lose close relatives. What matters is how a person handles the issue. Kubler-Ross invented the five stages of grief; denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptancethat explain the escalation of grief when stricken by bad news (Axelrod, 2004). The paper looks into the book and its relation to the five stages of grief.

Death is a universally experienced phenomenon. In the United States alone, over 2.6 million people die each year (Center for Disease Control and Prevention [CDC], 2015). For practitioners, it is of utmost importance to better understand the process of grief to develop better interventions for bereaved individuals.

Loss is defined as the experience of having something taken from you or destroyed (Loss, 2016). In the senior population losses become more common and frequent due to dwindling health circumstances, among other circumstances. “Functional losses experienced by the elderly include physical performance, balance, mobility, and muscle strength” (Nakano, Otonari, Takara, Carmo & Tanaka, 2014, p. 583). Situational or circumstantial losses may be the loss of a partner or the loss of a home due to being transferred into a retirement home or health care facility. Losses are enhanced by any diseases a person may have making it more difficult to deal with these losses. “Taking a look at diabetes; diabetes plays a key role in many individuals in the older adult population lives, more than 25% of adults over the age of 65 in America have been diagnosed with diabetes” (Kirkman, 2012, p. 2650). This disease alters the rate of which losses are experienced and in turn how the elderly grief over the loss. “Diabetic patients are more likely to experience depression and diabetic patients are more likely to undergo amputation from limb loss” (Spiess, McLemore, Zinyemba, Ortiz & Meyr, 2014, p. 1068). Being diagnosed with diabetes impacts every aspect of one’s life and creates difficulties in caring for oneself that need to be dutifully addressed.

Grief is the act following the loss of a loved one. While grief and bereavement are normal occurrences, the grief process is a social construct of how someone should behave. The acceptable ways that people grieve change because of this construct. For a time it was not acceptable to grieve; today, however, it is seen as a necessary way to move on from death (Scheid, 2011).The grief process has been described as a multistage event, with each stage lasting for a suggested amount of time to be considered “normal” and reach resolution. The beginning stage of grief is the immediate shock, disbelief, and denial lasting from hours to weeks (Wambach, 1985). The middle stage is the acute mourning phase that can include somatic and emotional turmoil. This stage includes acknowledging the event and processing it on various levels, both mentally and physically. The final stage is a period of

Grief will eventually affect everyone. It is a part of life that people like to avoid, but are never able to. Grief occurs when a person looses a loved one, an animal, if they are diagnosed with a terminal illness, going through a break up, or anything that makes a person feel a deep sorrow. In Chapter 13 of Medical Law and Ethics (pg. 337), The Five Stages of Dying or Grief is discussed. In this Chapter, it breaks down the Five Stages of Grief a patient, caregiver, friend, or family member may go through.

Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, (2014), a Swiss-born American psychiatrist, introduced concept of providing psychological counselling to the dying. In her first book, On Death and Dying (published in 1969), she write about the “five stages of grief”, they are denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. based on her studies of the feelings of patients facing terminal illness, and have being generalised to other types of negative life changes and losses, such as divorce, loss of property or job, and offered strategies for treating patients and their families as they negotiate these stages.

In her seminal work on grief and grieving, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross introduced the concept now very well known as the Five (5) Stages of Grief, enumerated chronologically as follows: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In this concept, Kubler-Ross explored and discussed the normative stages that people go through when they experience the loss of a loved one and feel grief as result of this loss. It is also through these stages that people are now more aware of their feelings and thoughts when experiencing grief and the loss of a loved one. While the stages of loss are mainly developed for grief experienced with the death of a loved one, it is a generally accepted framework in understanding feelings of grief when an individual experiences the loss of a significant individual in his/her life. The discussions that follow center on the discussion of Kubler-Ross' 5 Stages of Grief, applied in the context of the Story of Job in the Bible.

One theory is by Kubler-Ross she identified five stages of grief which are Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance. Individuals can spend different amounts of time on these stages and these stages don’t need to be processed in order (www.ekrfoundation.org 2016).

Theories and models that have been developed to explain how or why we feel what we do and ways of working through grief. Many professionals have expanded on Freud’s model of bereavement, which emphasises that grief about personal attachments and the process of experiencing pain, detaching from the deceased and rebuilding a new life with them (Walsh, 2012). Margaret Stroebe and Hank Schut’s model attempts to explain how people alternate from intense pining and normality for the dead person (Walsh, 2012). Psychologist J. William Worden’s stage-based model outlines four tasks of grief, to: accept, work through, adjust, maintain and move on (Worden & Winokuer, 2011). Therese Rando’s model outlines how people proceed through six phases of mourning in order