Weekly Review Issue No. 24

On being aware of death at work, how healthcare professionals stubbornly conceal death, living positively with Alzheimer’s and finding acceptance through music.

Hello and welcome back to another Review. I hope you’ll at least one thing you find interesting, useful or enjoyable. If something particularly resonated, I’d love to know about it.

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What’s alive for me

I’m getting a bit spotty with these Reviews. Apologies… life is busy at the moment, and between a holiday to Germany with my wider family and general busyness.. who knew that renovating a house was so time consuming? But the calluses, body weariness are actually welcome changes to a normally desk-based life. However, this one is here. So without further ado, let’s just jump into this week’s links!

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Research on the edges

👩🏽‍💻 Death awareness and organisational workplaces

Awareness and acceptance are themes for me at the moment, so a lot of reading is around this. This is a great paper that takes the Terror Management Theory, and places it into the workplace context. Sadly, I feel like I’ve experienced this first hand: the extremely negative effects of people becoming aware of death that spurs dysfunctional behaviour. So its important to be able to surface, evidence and work through ways to support people through it. Death is inescapable, and if we find a way to not conceal it (see below) we’ll need strategies to support people to maintaining positive, functional relationships.

We presented evidence that death awareness is associated with potentially dysfunctional attitudes and behaviors. These include workplace aggression, prejudicial attitudes toward others, and harsh retribution following counter normative action.

👨🏻‍⚕️ Social acceptance of death and its implication for end‐of‐life care

This is a very interesting paper about how healthcare professionals are affected by death. It seems obvious that they would be, but the barely conscious/unconscious behaviours are just screaming to be made more visible IMO. Healthcare professionals are not robots, they are people and there is a balance to be struck about having a person caring for another in a compassionate, humane way that acknowledges the effects we have on each other, and also being able to do the things required of that caring person. I wonder how much the predisposition of concealing death is reflected in different people in different fields… like are surgeons by personality type, the type of person for whom death is not something to be engaged with, and so enables them to take the calculated risks required for complex surgery?

The emerging theory of social patterns about death shows that healthcare professionals are influenced by the culture of concealment and stubbornness towards death. Thus, an effort and internal work are essential to make death a part of existence. Besides, social patterns of coping with death have an effect on end-of-life care and healthcare professionals. Nowadays, social coping with death is influenced by a culture of concealment and stubbornness towards death according to our results determined that this way of conceiving death is a way of coping in the most developed contemporary societies.

The social denial of death leaves us lacking coping strategies, which are only developed based on our own personal experience. Although the first experiences with death partly determine our attitudes towards it, healthcare professionals should understand the complicated mental patterns of the acceptance of death of their patient to provide quality dying care.

👵🏻 Wendy Mitchell on living positively with Alzheimer’s

Move past the skydiving and dwell on her attitude to acceptance, and how it totally shifts how she lives day-to-day. It’s so good.

At one point in One Last Thing, Mitchell describes such conversations as a reciprocal act of love. “Our relationship has changed big time,” she says quietly. “I’ve changed big time.” Her daughters now call her “the gregarious alien”, a moniker that makes her chuckle when she remembers the woman she was pre-diagnosis, in what she calls her “other life”. Previously quiet and introverted, “now I’ll talk to anyone,” she laughs. I’m hesitant to call her dementia a liberating force, I tell Mitchell, but there is a surprising lightness and dynamism whenever she speaks. Liberation is the right word, Mitchell answers, because there is freedom in the ever-diminishing responsibility.

🍄 Psilocybin-enhanced group psychotherapy for depression shows promise in patients with cancer

This kind of research is so badly needed. What I love about all this burgeoning area is the ground people are making every month, every year. There’s so much to this that confirms what shamans and other practitioners have been doing for aeons, and yet it also categorically, rigorously outlines the places and spaces that will require much more attention if we are to truly try and heal many more people using these plant medicines. If I could re-start my career, it would be to orient towards this stuff. I am not hippy enough (yet, in the best possible way) to align myself to the softest, humanest possible approach to healing, but I am not also a scientist, nor scientifically minded, to do this hard research. I guess I’ll just have to stay in between the worlds then!

Six out of 12 participants reported having a complete mystical experience during the psilocybin session, as measured by the MEQ-30 (Mystical Experience Questionnaire). Participants who had a complete mystical experience reported greater decreases in depression scores compared to those who did not have such an experience.

“I was surprised at the magnitude of scores on the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, which were higher than typically seen with psilocybin studies using this dose range,” Lewis noted. “It is unclear to what extent the group model amplified these effects however that is an interesting question for further investigation.”

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🎧 Listen

I’ve honestly had this album on continual repeat all week. It’s the latest Queens of the Stone Age album, In Times New Roman (If nothing else I am forever appreciating terrible typography jokes).

Josh Homme as the singer and leader of the shifting band is a very interesting guy. His style of rock and roll can on the surface seem like many others, but more deeply his drunken rambling, desert rock has a heat to it, and also a very real sensitivity and authenticity to it.

Like all great pieces of art, this album is born out of grief. I could tell the instant I heard it. It has this quality, this urgency, this vitality that you don’t always hear in music. I’m so glad for it.

For those interested, there’s an incredible interview with Josh and Zane Lowe, where the themes of grief and acceptance are at the forefront.

Watching/hearing a man go from wild, drug-fuelled anarchy, to soft acceptance about life and death through music, is a real gift, and I take a lot of solace and solidarity from it.

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🤔 Last thought