Category Archives: Grief

Lost a Pet? How To Help Your Other Pets Grieve

28 Feb 2016

When a family pet dies, naturally the humans in the household grieve the death of their beloved companion, which often serves as a form of animal therapy for folks with mental illness. However, surviving animals in multi-pet households may also react to the loss in a variety of ways.

If grief is measured by changes in behavior, then grieving is common throughout the animal world.

In her book “How Animals Grieve,” Barbara J. King, a professor of anthropology at the College of William & Mary, defines grief like this: “When a survivor animal acts in ways that are visibly distressed or altered from the usual routine in the aftermath of the death of a companion animal who had mattered emotionally to him or her.” King cites studies and observations that show that animals in the wild, from elephants to birds, exhibit grieving behaviors, as do household pets.

The Companion Animal Mourning Project, a study conducted by the ASCPA, found that more than 60 percent of both dogs and cats exhibited four or more behavioral changes after the death of a fellow pet in the household. Changes include eating less or possibly not at all, craving more attention from their owners, changes in vocalization (barking or meowing more or less than usual) and changes in sleeping places or other habits.

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/living/pets/article60433361.html#storylink=cpy

Enter the Grief Police

27 Jan 2016

The first World War transformed, along with so much else, the way people mourn. The British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer argues that the death of so many people in such a small span of time overwhelmed those they left behind, and rendered them unable to undergo the rituals that had previously been in place for grieving. Combined with the rise of psychoanalysis and its emphasis on the interiority of the individual—Freud’s Mourning and Melancholia presented grief as a highly personal phenomenon—the social practice of mourning was transformed in the early 20th century, to the extent that, by the 1960s, Gorer was describing grief as something to be kept “under complete control by strength of will and character, so that it need be given no public expression.”

Bereavement and Healing: Burden of Shame

13 Jan 2016

Last year at this time, I laid to rest, a young man at the cusp of his young adult life. He had been driving along a secluded backwoods road and had decided to text his girlfriend that he was on his way home from work. In so doing, he veered over into the oncoming lane as he crested a hill. Unfortunately, a man of middle age was traveling on his way to work and crested that same hill at that same moment. They collided, both died.

Emotional wellness: battling the winter blues

09 Dec 2015

Much like the seasons, we are constantly experiencing changes in our lives. Sometimes these changes can weigh a heavy toll on us, affecting ouremotional wellness. This dimension of wellness involves the awareness, understanding, and acceptance of our feelings as they come and go.

Habits, addiction, ego and mental illness

05 Dec 2015

One of the biggest challenges people with mental illness face are references to being cured. The illnesses can be treated and controlled , but they do not go away. Donald Trump was right.

People who have personality disorders appear normal and accomplished, and their accomplishments can make them feel above others. They see everyone else, not themselves, as needing treatment. It is very different from having a big ego.

 

 

‘Nothing prepares you for crash-landing on Planet Grief’

25 Oct 2015

There was nothing remarkable about how the morning of Sunday February 27 2011 began. OK, I woke up in Barbados instead of London, but although my body was on holiday, my brain had not yet adapted to the more relaxed surroundings of the Caribbean, and it buzzed with its usual anxieties: I’ve got a sore throat; I can feel a zit coming up; how are the dog’s bowels?

Grief is unpredictable in ‘After You’

12 Oct 2015

Grief is a tricky subject. It’s a tricky subject in real life, because no two people will ever deal with it in exactly the same way, and often we expect people to deal with their grief much differently than they actually do.

Grief is unpredictable in ‘After You’

05 Oct 2015

Grief is a tricky subject. It’s a tricky subject in real life, because no two people will ever deal with it in exactly the same way, and often we expect people to deal with their grief much differently than they actually do.