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.
