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Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

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Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#21

Post by graemep »

righthand wrote: post #8
graemep wrote: post #2

There is a problem with rigid medical definitions. There is a huge difference between the author of this, a young pregnant woman losing her husband, and say, something like a middle aged person losing an elderly parent (as I did earlier this year). Of course it will take her far longer to recover (if at all). I would guess her grief is not "disordered" though. As she says she functions - she works, she looks after he…

In the west we’re trained to believe that if something happens there should be some sort of tangible reward on the other end, no matter how minute. Death takes and leaves nothing tangible and it’s the absence that drives us crazy. Since we’re trained this way we seek out some solution with the other trained aspect, spending money. Which in turn only temporarily numbs the grief until you deal with it. We also stigmati…

It used to be in the west. The Catholic Church discourages the scattering of ashes for just that reason - so that there is somewhere physical where people can be remembered. There was a tradition of memorial services. People still look after the graves of their loved ones.

I also think its not a simple east-west divide. Different cultures have many different ways of dealing with death. The contemporary west does have a problem, although i doubt it is the only culture for which that is true.

My family follows a mix of Christian tradition (e.g. memorial masses) and Sri Lankan (e.g. donations of food in memory of the dead).

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#22

Post by embwbam »

pastage wrote: post #15
righthand wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the west we’re trained to believe that if something happens there should be some sort of tangible reward on the other end, no matter how minute. Death takes and leaves nothing tangible and it’s the absence that drives us crazy. Since we’re trained this way we seek out some solution with the other trained aspect, spending money. Which in turn only temporarily numbs the grief until you deal with it. We also stigmati…

I wonder how traditions around death help us to deal with it. I feel completely incapable of handling death.. I do not know how to comport myself.

A lot! Maybe it's obvious, but I've long thought that religion's primary function is to help people process death (and other suffering). Now that life isn't constant suffering, many of us have discarded religion, but then we are blindsided by death.

I was very religious for 30 years, and have a very religious family. I've been athiest for more than a decade now, and it's sad to me that to leave religion behind I had to give up all my family traditions to process death. Those traditions are still there, but I can't relate to them since they are based on a belief I no longer agree with

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#23

Post by tedggh »

I have been through two very painful deaths, first by brother then my father and both had very similar transitions from shock to acceptance to grief and finally to the new normal. Both cases took years to heal. I stopped dreaming about my brother after about 10 years of his death. It has been 5 years since my dad passed and I still have very vivid dreams that upset me very much, but they are much less common now than say two years ago and I know at some point, like the dreams about my brother, they will stop. Everything succumbs to time, including grief.

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#24

Post by AlexandrB »

righthand wrote: post #8
graemep wrote: post #2

There is a problem with rigid medical definitions. There is a huge difference between the author of this, a young pregnant woman losing her husband, and say, something like a middle aged person losing an elderly parent (as I did earlier this year). Of course it will take her far longer to recover (if at all). I would guess her grief is not "disordered" though. As she says she functions - she works, she looks after he…

In the west we’re trained to believe that if something happens there should be some sort of tangible reward on the other end, no matter how minute. Death takes and leaves nothing tangible and it’s the absence that drives us crazy. Since we’re trained this way we seek out some solution with the other trained aspect, spending money. Which in turn only temporarily numbs the grief until you deal with it. We also stigmati…

> We also stigmatize mental health care in the west, telling people to “suck it up” or “get over it”.

I think this idea is ~10 years out of date. If anything, we now seem pathologize every behavior and personality quirk into a mental health issue. At least on social media, it's also trendy to have a mental health issue to the point that people will claim to have ADHD because they're easily distracted by their phones. I've also lost count of the number of big "content creators" who casually mention their therapist or going to therapy. If there is a stigma, it's not found among the younger generations.

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#25

Post by moron4hire »

graemep wrote: post #2

There is a problem with rigid medical definitions. There is a huge difference between the author of this, a young pregnant woman losing her husband, and say, something like a middle aged person losing an elderly parent (as I did earlier this year). Of course it will take her far longer to recover (if at all). I would guess her grief is not "disordered" though. As she says she functions - she works, she looks after he…

> We medicalize grief because we fear it.

I think that's backwards. I think the problem is that we, the general populace, fear medicalization. The medicalization of grief specifically or other emotional issues generally is unrelated.

These sorts of diagnosis criteria are created for a reason. I highly doubt psychiatric medical practitioners are developing them to pack people up into bins so that they can be marginalized. They create these criteria to be able to have a shared language to speak about issues and try to develop treatment regimens.

And it's not their fault that the lay population takes it out of context and screams, "NO NO NO! I'M NOT BROKEN!" It's that reaction that is the problem. That reaction that, "someone who fits this criteria is by-definition broken", with "and broken people are irredemable" followed closely behind. It belies a belief that they feel this way about other people, too.

The truth is, everyone deals with issues that would fit some criteria in the DSM-5. It's just part of the human condition. Some people are able to manage these issues on their own and some people are not, and that doesn't make them broken anymore than the fact that some people can dunk a basketball and some cannot. But, if you're 5'9" and had a job to put a ball in a basket 10 feet off the ground, wouldn't you want to focus on learning to shoot rather than try techniques you've observed 6'9" people use with ease?

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#26

Post by watwut »

xyzelement wrote: post #19
Rooster61 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often wonder how dealing with death compares to the east where ancestors are commonly remembered, contemplated, and revered. In what way is this not western as well? Implying that western culture does not remember, contemplate, and revere those that have gone before us is a bad take.

I agree with you on the western religious tradition, but I think it's less true for the secular west today. With ample exceptions of course, a stereotypical "secular" person thinks of their ancestors as racist people that lived in an irrelevant time, and doesn't feel some sort of connection to them, or an obligation to continue them. So I think the poster you're replying to is kinda correct from a today point of view…

Your made up straw man secular person is, frankly, ridiculous. Like, we all get it, conservative Christians hate the rest of us and look down on us. Duh.

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#27

Post by SketchySeaBeast »

xyzelement wrote: post #19
Rooster61 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I often wonder how dealing with death compares to the east where ancestors are commonly remembered, contemplated, and revered. In what way is this not western as well? Implying that western culture does not remember, contemplate, and revere those that have gone before us is a bad take.

I agree with you on the western religious tradition, but I think it's less true for the secular west today. With ample exceptions of course, a stereotypical "secular" person thinks of their ancestors as racist people that lived in an irrelevant time, and doesn't feel some sort of connection to them, or an obligation to continue them. So I think the poster you're replying to is kinda correct from a today point of view…

> a typical "secular" person thinks of their ancestors as racist people that lived in an irrelevant time,

I think you missed the "stereo" in front of your "typical".

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#28

Post by Aurornis »

aeturnum wrote: post #17

> We medicalize grief because we fear it. I think this is just incorrect. You are not obligated to seek treatment for most medical problems[1]. The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in and when people enter a situation where they may need external help. One of the diagnostic criteria, which this article mentions, is that y…

> The point of medicalizing something is to draw a line between situations where it would be too soon for medical professionals to step in

The problem is that medical diagnoses and therapy speak have spilled over into common language where they’re so diluted that they’re not accurate any more. For many there is no line drawn anywhere because they are self-diagnosing based on flawed understandings as soon as any feeling or symptom arrives.

This is scarily obvious when I’ve worked with college students and early 20s juniors lately: A subset of them speak of everything human nature in medical and therapy speak. Common human experiences like being sad about something or having a tough day are immediately amplified into full-blown medical terms like “I’m having a depressive episode today” (which is gone by tomorrow). Being a little nervous about something is “I’m having a panic attack”. Remembering an unpleasant disagreement at work “gives me PTSD”. When they’re procrastinating a task that is fun “my ADHD is flaring up today”.

This is only a subset of people, but it’s a rapidly growing percentage of younger people I work with. When someone falls into this mindset it only grows: The same people using these terms usually accumulate a lot of different self-diagnoses to cover every element of common human experience: They will claim ADHD, social anxiety, often some variation of Autism despite showing none of the signs, PTSD due to a previous relationship/boss/professor they didn’t get along with, and insomnia or delayed sleep phase syndrome. Many will have no formal diagnosis at all or even proudly claim that they don’t trust the medical system, they’re just diagnosing themselves.

I’ve been offered helpful links to TikTok ADHD influencers to help me understand them, because that’s where they think the best information comes from. 20-something engineers confidently tell me they know more than their doctors about ADHD and how to treat it (usually after their doctor refuses to increase their dose of Adderall again or denies them some other controlled substance they think they need like ketamine or perpetual daily Xanax). There’s also a growing culture of casual drug abuse and misuse that gets justified as self-medication, but that’s a topic for another post.

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#29

Post by XorNot »

graemep wrote: post #2

There is a problem with rigid medical definitions. There is a huge difference between the author of this, a young pregnant woman losing her husband, and say, something like a middle aged person losing an elderly parent (as I did earlier this year). Of course it will take her far longer to recover (if at all). I would guess her grief is not "disordered" though. As she says she functions - she works, she looks after he…

> Absolutely right. There is a certain cowardice in how we deal with death in the contemporary west.

Someone always rocks up to say this in these threads, and then never actually offers any suggestions of what they think an alternative should look like.

It's in the same vein as people who complain no one ever talks about serious subjects, and I'm just wondering why they think I want to get into discussing the meaning of life in the workplace cafeteria.

Seriously, what is the alternative meant to be? A celebration of death? Constantly reminding people that everyone will die and you'll be forgotten completely in about 3 generations? Why focus on the inevitable rather then actually living?

Re: Grief gets an expiration date, just like us

#30

Post by fatnoah »

sudosteph wrote: post #18

Having experienced a few hard losses this year (My dad to ALS, and my cat suddenly a week after my dad), the thing that has surprised me the most is how they show up in my dreams. In some dreams, I'm like "I thought you were dead? What am I going to do with all these death certificates now?", in others we're just hanging out at the pool. I never dreamed about my dad before he died. But in these dreams he's just there…

I'm sorry for your losses.

My dad died of cancer when I was 26, and I had very frequent dreams where it felt like he was real and present, though never speaking or interacting directly with me. The grief persisted for years.

Nearly 25 years later, my mom passed away this summer, and it's been a totally different experience. The grief was just as intense as when my dad passed, but contained to a few weeks.

Our bodies and brains are complicated.

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