How to solve emotional problems?

There is no preoccupation with the departed one. Often there is difficulty in recalling the image of the dead person. Overall, in effect, unsuccessful mourners are trying to deny the emotional importance of the death in their lives and are trying to get on with living without the burden of mourning. But while, in the short run, they may seem happier than active mourners, they pay, in the long run, with more suffering. 

A guideline for physicians, as a means of making use of the study, may be helpful for you personally and perhaps for others in the family. It is simply this: To help people grieve successfully, it is not essential to bring to light any deeply buried psychological reasons for their failure to start to grieve properly.

What is vital is just to get them, by any possible means, to think of the image of the deceased, to avoid putting the image out of mind, to actually dwell on the image, and to go over repeatedly in their minds the many activities shared with the departed one in the past-so they can realize, once and for all during the mourning process, that he will be missing from their lives.

HELP FOR EMOTIONAL PROBLEMS TODAY, NEW forms of help are available for people with critical emotional problems-psychiatric treatments which are brief, pointed, and relatively inexpensive. They promise not only to provide an immediate lift for people in trouble but also to prevent more serious illness, physicalor mental or both, that otherwise might develop. One of these is crisis intervention, a kind of emotional first aid. 

It has been said, perhaps somewhat overenthusiastically but nevertheless with some basis in fact, that there have been three revolutions in mental health. The first was the medical discovery, less than two centuries ago, that the insane were neither criminal nor possessed by demons but rather sick people.

The second was Freud's insights into the deeper levels of the mind. The third is crisis intervention. Crisis intervention aims at dealing with a specific incident that causes a crisis. Rather than delving analytically into past events and early life experiences which might have contributed to a problem, its objective is to get the person over the hump immediately so he or she can function effectively. 

As a part of psychiatry, crisis intervention developed out of the experiences of Dr. Eric Lindemann after the Boston nightclub fire we mentioned earlier. During his studies of bereavement reactions among relatives of the dead, Dr. Lindemann not only found that grief work passes through a series of steps essential for mental health; he also determined that the human capacity to cope with problems, which is not inborn but rather is gained through experience, often falters in a time of crisis. 

In 1948, Dr. Lindemann and a Harvard colleague, Dr. Gerald Caplan, established the Wellesley Project, a communitywide mental health program in a town near Boston, with special emphasis on preventive intervention.