Weekly Review Issue No. 26
On the importance of being with one another, meaning and eco-anxiety, what is a good death anyway, innovative interventions to tackle the fear of death
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
As the father of a toddler, for whom the evening routine is the orbit by which I spend most of my week out of hours, it was a deep nourishing joy to be out for dinner with a group of wonderful humans this week. There was an undercurrent that played out amongst the dinner table about the community-building work that everyone was involved with. I stand out here a little bit because that is not really the work I do (yet). But it was so enlivening to be with people who want to be with people, and spend their energies bringing people together in various important ways. To tackle injustice, climate change, psychological and spiritual health and come closer into communion with the larger things. This is the thing that felt so robbed from us from the darkest COVID-era… the inability to gather and be with others, especially others outside your inner most circle. COVID is not over, and every season it will put pressure on all of us (and others even more so) to keep our distance, which is why building various communities is so important. We need many diverse ways of being together.
Research on the edges
Another piece that sits as a milestone on the road I am walking. Meaning-making is such a nebulous concept that is kind of badly utilised by life coaches to flatten it into a sort of mechanism for achieving the next career step. On the other hands, it simply gets lumped in with ‘being religious’. It’s so much more than that, and why it’s so important in our age is outlined wonderfully here.
Every person has some kind of “meaning system”: a way in which their various meanings are related to each other and function. We may or may not be aware of various elements in our meaning systems, because awareness needs reflection and help from others. The concept of meaning system is thus even broader than “worldview” or “religion”, since a meaning system refers to our overall way of being in the world, which includes a worldview and sometimes elements of religion.
Meaning is one of the key issues for me in relation to eco-emotions, and it is used in many frameworks. When it comes to climate emotions, how does one actually practice meaning-focused coping? Is that separate from other things one does to cope?
🛌 Matters of care and the good death – rhetoric or reality?
There was a great debate on Twitter about this - and I piped in by adding my perspective that the ‘good death’ was to me, an invention of the ancient Romans who idealised how one dies. Case in point: Emperor Augustus died mid-kiss, in a bold setting of standards in 14 AD. But this paper is really important to counter the assumptions about what we collectively call a ‘good death’. Wisely it was commented that this is as much a form of power over people (because why would anyone want a bad death?) that can be traced through colonial/dominator cultures.
Research literature and policy documents across fields continue to place emphasis on the ‘good death’. As part of the equity turn in palliative care, there is a growing body of work highlighting the diverse perspectives of people whose voices were heretofore not understood. Inequities are evident not only in terms of who has access to a ‘good death’ but also related to the effects of the dominant ‘good death’ script itself.
I loved this. It also reminds me I really need to finish up my piece that I wrote last July about a walk I took through Canterbury to Dover (a not too shabby 35km+ walk in an afternoon), that was a quietly spiritual experience. We get obsessed collectively about monuments to the past, but these living paths are history being presented to us alive and well.
Paths are primary; their form built into our brain and part of our origin myth. Consequently, we rarely think about their origins; how they formed and where they came from. We don’t think of them as historic features, and tend not to consider the stories embedded in them. But when we do think about it, a hidden history is revealed, and something of the experience of our predecessors comes alive to us.
A Qualitative Study of How Hospice Workers Cope With Their Level of Exposure to Death
I’d love to see more about this kind of work to explore how people who work in palliative and end-of-life care mange their death anxiety. I’ve seen from colleagues and other people just how it is as much about temperament, attitude, psychological robustness as much as training to make it possible to engage continually with mortality. Palliative care people do tend, in my opinion, to be built different. But at the same time, they have exposure to things that I think are necessary for the rest of us to have more of, and so what can we learn from them?
Two theoretically informative trends appeared. First, hospice workers largely manage death anxiety as identified by existing literature with the notable exception that hospice workers overall seem to integrate death and dying into their worldviews as a meaningful category, as opposed to avoiding thinking about death. Second, even among those regularly exposed to death, there seems to be a range across participants on a continuum from avoiding to confronting the topic of death.
😰 Addressing fear of death and dying: traditional and innovative interventions
Pure catnip for me. A wee nod to technology (I love how the overlap between an explosion of virtual reality with Apple’s Vision Pro meets the needs that I understand of people needing to engage with mortality) and psychedelics, but also the various other ways to address fear of death. If you need access/the PDF just let me know. It’s worth it!
Effective intervention strategies for fear of death and dying do exist, but all have practical and therapeutic limitations. Psychotherapy appears to be an effective tool at reducing death anxiety. Mindfulness exercises are able to reduce anxiety as well but are not often associated with a change in afterlife belief. Psychedelics dissociate mind from body, causing a mystical experience that has been shown to reduce death anxiety, but restrictions on their use limit their availability for therapy. Virtual reality appears to have the potential to reduce death anxiety, possibly by simulating an out-of-body experience and strengthening belief in an afterlife. Although some interventions appear to have a positive impact on fear of death and dying, the literature does not support a clearly superior therapeutic approach.
🎧 Listen
This has defintely got Darkwave vibe going on here. It’s like a sanitised experience of someone (me) remembering Berlin nightclub experiences in the mid-00s. I picture swaying moody goths in the darkness kissing, falling into loving bliss.
🤔 Last thought
