Post by Dave on Feb 16, 2011 7:56:48 GMT -5
I'm not sure how to take this article, given that today's university is a large marketplace and insurance companies and government agencies with ulterior motives often shop for research(ers) to support their opinions and business.
Grief, Unedited
Op-Ed Contributor
By RUTH DAVIS KONIGSBERG
Published: February 14, 2011
EVER since Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” began its long run as a best seller in 2005, a number of first-person accounts of losing a husband have been published. Among them are Kate Braestrup’s “Here If You Need Me,” Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” and Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Nothing Was the Same.” This week, they are being joined by Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir “A Widow’s Story,” which recounts the death of her 77-year-old husband, Raymond Smith, from complications of pneumonia in 2008. While these memoirs are often moving, they are also highly subjective snapshots that don’t teach us much about how we typically grieve, nor more important, for how long.
Related
In the past decade, social scientists with unprecedented access to large groups of widows and widowers have learned that, as individual an experience as grief may be, there are specific patterns to its intensity and duration that are arguably more helpful in guiding the bereaved in what to expect. They have found that most older people who lose spouses from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. In fact, for many, acute grief tends to lift well within six months after the loss.
This discovery and subsequent work in the field has been driven primarily by George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia. Before he began his research, few bereavement studies had looked at what percentage of widows and widowers recovered quickly, and what percentage were still mired in sadness years later. And none had managed to evaluate the respondents before their loss to get a sense of their overall emotional well-being.
But by tapping into an existing, long-term survey called the Changing Lives of Older Couples Study, done at the University of Michigan, Professor Bonanno was able to obtain baseline measurements of more than 1,000 married individuals. Participants in the study who subsequently lost a spouse were then invited for follow-up interviews at intervals of 6, 18 and 48 months after the death.
The single largest group — about 50 percent — showed very little sign of shock, despair, anxiety or intrusive thoughts (the hallmark symptoms of acute grief) even six months after their loss. Those subjects were also screened for lethargy, sleeplessness, inability to experience pleasure and problems in appetite — the classic symptoms of clinical depression — and came up clean on those as well. That didn’t mean that they didn’t still miss their spouses, but that they had returned to somewhat normal functioning, contradicting the popular maxim of widowhood that “the second year is harder than the first.”
CONTINUED AT:
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15Konigsberg.html
Grief, Unedited
Op-Ed Contributor
By RUTH DAVIS KONIGSBERG
Published: February 14, 2011
EVER since Joan Didion’s book “The Year of Magical Thinking” began its long run as a best seller in 2005, a number of first-person accounts of losing a husband have been published. Among them are Kate Braestrup’s “Here If You Need Me,” Anne Roiphe’s “Epilogue” and Kay Redfield Jamison’s “Nothing Was the Same.” This week, they are being joined by Joyce Carol Oates’s memoir “A Widow’s Story,” which recounts the death of her 77-year-old husband, Raymond Smith, from complications of pneumonia in 2008. While these memoirs are often moving, they are also highly subjective snapshots that don’t teach us much about how we typically grieve, nor more important, for how long.
Related
In the past decade, social scientists with unprecedented access to large groups of widows and widowers have learned that, as individual an experience as grief may be, there are specific patterns to its intensity and duration that are arguably more helpful in guiding the bereaved in what to expect. They have found that most older people who lose spouses from natural causes recover much more quickly than we have come to expect. In fact, for many, acute grief tends to lift well within six months after the loss.
This discovery and subsequent work in the field has been driven primarily by George Bonanno, a clinical psychologist at Teachers College, Columbia. Before he began his research, few bereavement studies had looked at what percentage of widows and widowers recovered quickly, and what percentage were still mired in sadness years later. And none had managed to evaluate the respondents before their loss to get a sense of their overall emotional well-being.
But by tapping into an existing, long-term survey called the Changing Lives of Older Couples Study, done at the University of Michigan, Professor Bonanno was able to obtain baseline measurements of more than 1,000 married individuals. Participants in the study who subsequently lost a spouse were then invited for follow-up interviews at intervals of 6, 18 and 48 months after the death.
The single largest group — about 50 percent — showed very little sign of shock, despair, anxiety or intrusive thoughts (the hallmark symptoms of acute grief) even six months after their loss. Those subjects were also screened for lethargy, sleeplessness, inability to experience pleasure and problems in appetite — the classic symptoms of clinical depression — and came up clean on those as well. That didn’t mean that they didn’t still miss their spouses, but that they had returned to somewhat normal functioning, contradicting the popular maxim of widowhood that “the second year is harder than the first.”
CONTINUED AT:
www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15Konigsberg.html