Suicide bereavement support groups are a valuable source of help for people coping with a suicide and it is important to understand how they are beneficial, as well as ways in which they may be unhelpful or even detrimental. A constructivist grounded theory approach was implemented and17 family members bereaved by suicide were interviewed, along with seven participants in a focus group. The findings highlighted the difficulties for participants to adjust to the suicide, which motivated them to meet others in a peer suicide bereavement group who had shared a similar experience. This helped them to normalise their grief experiences and share ways of coping with the death. Some participants encountered practical challenges of accessing groups, found other ways of coping or described their needs as unmet. It is recommended that health services proactively provide bereaved families with timely and ongoing information on support available, including peer support groups, to minimise negative health outcomes.
Bereavement can be a distressing experience and the importance of bereavement support has been recognised in policy and practice for many years. This rapid evidence assessment was undertaken to evaluate the provision and effectiveness of bereavement support in the United Kingdom (UK) and to identify gaps in service provision and areas of need with regard to bereavement services. The main finding of the review was that the provision of bereavement support is extremely varied and there is no conclusive evidence for its effectiveness. There is widespread recognition of the potentially negative impact of bereavement on people, and a plethora of recommendations focused on raising awareness and ameliorating these effects have been made. However, the evidence for how best to support people experiencing bereavement is limited and contested.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the remaking of the meaning of perinatal death in Canadian hospitals from that of the silencing to the recognition and attention to women's grief (Davidson, 2007). By the mid-twentieth century both birth and death were increasingly removed from the home and placed in healthcare and funeral facilities (Aries, 1981; Walter, 1994). Beginning in the 1950s when hospital birth had become the general social norm, death around the time of birth became a new institutional concern. Using a symbolic interactionist approach, I document how this new standard of care emerged as perinatal bereavement protocols in the Canadian context. Situating the emergence in its historical context, it is examined here through the time-relevant literature - that is, the literature that influenced the changes from the 1960s through the early 2000s. Then, examined through more recent literature, I illustrate how the protocols continue to work for one extended family after their experience of stillbirth in 2012.
Compassionate initiatives to support the bereaved increasingly come from a diverse range of different resources within our local and national communities. There has been a growing recognition by researchers of the significance of the wide variety of community support available, identifying and describing some of the characteristics and benefits of these different resources. As we consider our local community, and how best we serve the needs of the bereaved, these studies can give us inspiration and guidance as we create networks of provision.
2019 marks the twentieth anniversary of the 1999 landmark publication Ambiguous loss: learning to live with unresolved grief by Emeritus Professor Pauline Boss. The book, and its exploration of uncertainty, has invited ambiguous loss into the grief counselling space, as a way to provide specialised care for families and friends of missing people. This scoping review aims to examine the breadth of literature regarding counselling interventions from the previous work of Boss to the present day, as a way to enhance quality of life for people left behind when someone is missing. The literature highlights the experience of trauma relating to complicated mourning, as well as opportunities for post-traumatic growth while people wait for news of their loved ones. The results of the review, and suggestions for future research and therapeutic interventions, demonstrate that families of missing people need specialised support when they access grief counselling. The review demonstrates how counsellors can extend their knowledge of grief interventions and learn to tolerate uncertainty themselves in order to provide support to this important group of individuals post-loss and potentially prior to a confirmed bereavement.
