قم بتحميل هذا المقال بالعربية (PDF)*This article in ArabicIn the current situation of the Corona pandemic, traumatic losses are very common:
· People lose their beloved family members to the virus, without being able to take care of them, or say good-bye to them.
· Medical staff lose their patients to the virus, after they invested themselves personally and professionally to the maximum.
· People lose their jobs and have no financial income; former breadwinners of the family lose their status.
· People lose their houses and social network in their neighborhood, because they cannot afford their rent any more.
· People lose trust in the assumptions and principles that ruled their life before the Corona pandemic.
This pandemic situation sheds light on the fact, that frequently psychological suffering is caused by outer factors. It is a prime responsibility for every society that considers itself as humane, to prevent as much of this suffering as possible through action based on consultation with scientists.
Common grief reactions are
Feelings: shock, numbness, sadness, anger, guilt and self-reproach, anxiety, feeling disconnected from people, fatigue, helplessness, yearning, emancipation, relief. Eventually people go a few times through these different emotions in circles.
Physical sensations: hollowness in the stomach, tightness in the chest and throat, oversensitivity to noise, sense of depersonalization, breathlessness, weakness in the muscles, lack of energy, dry mouth.
Cognitions: disbelief, confusion, preoccupation, sense of presence, hallucinations.
Behaviors: sleep and appetite disturbances, absent-minded behavior, social withdrawal, recurrent dreams of the loss, avoiding reminders of the loss, restless overactivity, crying, visiting places or carrying objects that remind of the loss.
It is important to acknowledge that different people show different ways of grieving. There is no norm how people “should” grieve. Families and teams in grief and mourning often experience more psychological distance between each other, because everybody, in their own ways, is so preoccupied of dealing with the loss. Mutual empathy might diminish for a while.
Dealing with bereavement
People fare best if they are able
· to accept the reality of the loss, and stop denying it,
· to accept and work through the pain of grief; otherwise they will be stuck in emotional numbness and depression.
· to adjust to an environment in which the deceased is missing, and eventually do active modifications to the way they used to live; otherwise they will always remain helpless.
· to emotionally relocate the deceased by taking time to acknowledge the blessings and the dark sides of living with the deceased, and move on with life; otherwise they deprive themselves from the ability to love other people.
Complicated bereavement
Unresolved grief is at the heart of much physical and psychological long-term distress. The following clues might indicate unprocessed grief:
· The person cannot speak of the deceased without experiencing fresh and intense grief, even years after the death happened.
· Relatively minor events trigger off intense grief reactions.
· Themes of loss come up in personal encounters.
· The person is unwilling to separate from material objects that belonged to the deceased.
· The person developed medical symptoms like those the deceased experienced before death.
· The person made radical changes in his/her lifestyle following a death.
· The person presents a long history of signs of depression, or false elated mood.
· The person shows a compulsion to imitate the deceased.
· The person shows self-destructive impulses following the death of a close person.
· Unaccountable sadness occurs at a certain time each year.
· The person shows phobia about illness or death.
· The person indicates lack of family or social support around the time of death of a beloved one.
Unresolved grief is best helped through grief counselling and therapy. While those are often offered by trained health professionals, grief counselling can take place in self-help groups, in which at least one group member has undergone training.