Human Growth and Development
Lecture 21 - Death & Grieving
4/25/06
- Defining/Determining Death
- Harvard Criteria for brain death
- Criteria (need all of the following):
- unresponsivity/unreceptivity
- no movement or breathing for 1 hour
- flat electroencephalogram
- "You’re not dead until you’re warm and dead"
- Medical death = legal death
- Reactions to Loss
- To our own impending death (terminal illness)
- Kubler-Ross (1969) Stages
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
- Not empirically demonstrated
- May jump around stages
- Denial may not be a bad thing
- To someone else's death: 3 main patterns
- go from high distress to low distress
- never show much distress
- remain distressed for a long time
- Grief stages
- shock & disbelief
- preoccupation w/ memory of deceased
- resolution
- Highly variable
- age of deceased
- age of responder
- Children
- Adolescents
- Adults
- culture
- No such thing as a right way to feel
- Modern Death
- Modern medicine + safe environment = death as abnormal
- quality of life vs. length of life
- Hospice care
- terminal illness, often home-based
- not about prolonging life
- Palliative care = creating comfort
- Staff turnover
- Euthanasia
- Advance Directives
Human
Growth and Development
Last updated: 4/24/06