Our Departed

Few concepts have insinuated themselves into the popular culture as thoroughly as the so called "5 Stages of Grief": Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance.

We've heard it from professionals in all areas of the healthcare system (who should know better) as well as from lay persons of all ages (who shouldn't). There is even a lengthy comedy routine about it by Dustin Hoffman playing Lenny Bruce in the movie Lenny. The time has now come to ditch it as the concept has done more harm than good. Three Common Myths about the 5 Stages:

The 5 Stages of Grief were defined by Elsabeth Kubler-Ross In her book "On Death and Dying", Macmillan Publishing Company, 1969, she presents 5 stages terminally ill persons may go through upon learning of their terminal illness. She presents them as "an attempt to summarize what we have learned from our dying patients in terms of coping mechanisms at the time of a terminal illness". These stages were not originally the 5 stages of Grief but better: The 5 Stages of Receiving Catastrophic News. Over the next 28 years, healthcare professionals, clergy, nurses, doctors, caregivers, students, and other readers of the book somehow mutated the stages into the 5 stages of Grief.

The 5 Stages define the process a bereaved person must go through in order to resolve their grief. Grief is a complicated, multi-dimensional, individual process that can never be generalized in 5 steps. In fact, as will be shown, a person will generally have to go through the 5 stages before true grieving can even begin.

A person who isn't progressing through the 5 stages in sequence and in a timely manner needs professional help. This common belief has caused a lot of problems and misunderstandings. One researcher has shown that some caregivers have actually gotten angry at the bereaved person for not following the stages in order! The person shouldn't be angry yet because they haven't been through Denial.
All of the above points to a basic misunderstanding about what grief is to begin with so it's not surprising that myths continue to propagate. This is most likely because the pervasiveness and impact of grief wasn't really recognized by the psychological community until around the 1980s and even then it was slow in coming.

For example, in 1974 "The Handbook of Psychiatry" defined grief as "...the normal response to the loss of a loved one by death." Response to other kinds of losses were labeled "Pathological Depressive Reactions".

In 1984, Dr. Terese Rando---a noted grief specialist, researcher and author---defined grief as "...process of psychological, social and somatic reactions to the perception of loss".

In 1991, the Grief Resource Foundation of Dallas, Texas found that, for them, a good working and practical definition of Grief as "the total response of the organism to the process of change".