Bereavement during the Covid-19 pandemic in the UK: What do we know so far?

Abstract

The Covid-19 pandemic has been a devastating mass bereavement event, with measures to control the virus leading to unprecedented changes to end-of-life and mourning practices. In this review we consider the research evidence on the experiences of people bereaved during the pandemic. We summarise key findings reported in the first five publications from our UK-based Bereavement during COVID-19 study, drawing comparisons with available evidence from other studies of bereavement during the pandemic. We summarise these findings across three main topics: experiences at the end of life and in early bereavement; coping and informal support during the pandemic; and access to bereavement and mental health services. The synthesis demonstrates the exceptional challenges of pandemic bereavement, including high levels of disruption to end-of-life care, dying and mourning practices as well as to people’s social networks and usual coping mechanisms. We identified considerable needs for emotional, therapeutic and informal support among bereaved people, compounded by significant difficulties in receiving and accessing such support. We provide evidence-based recommendations for improving people’s experiences of bereavement and access to support at all levels.

‘There’s something about admitting that you are lonely’ – prevalence, impact and solutions to loneliness in terminal illness: An explanatory sequential multi-methods study

“…Loneliness was reported by healthcare professionals as prevalent among people with a terminal illness and their carers. While studies have highlighted loneliness as a prevalent issue during COVID-19 due to restrictions to protect public health, 27 – 29 findings highlight such experiences were exacerbated for carers (69.1%) and people with a terminal illness (72.1%) as they approached end of life.…”

Automatic Detection in Twitter of Non-Traumatic Grief Due to Deaths by COVID-19: A Deep Learning Approach

“…achieves state-of-the-art performance in various tasks [55]. In this work, the deberta-v3-base 11 was the selected version.…”

“…Society has reacted to this deficit spontaneously by moving to social networks, a natural means of expression in our current society [8]. Already in the year 2000, the effectiveness of mourning practices through social networks began to be evaluated in a context where internationalization, the rhythm of life, and even the interpretation of coping had changed [9]- [11]. A social debate is generated about the relevance of using these technologies in moments as decisive as the death process or the grieving responses with interactions through labels, hashtags, or other elements of the language of social networks, substituting or complementing the usual farewell and mourning practices [12], [13].…”

Prolonged grief during and beyond the pandemic: factors associated with levels of grief in a four time-point longitudinal survey of people bereaved in the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic

“…Most evidence to date on the grief and mental health consequences of pandemic bereavement is from studies conducted in China (12,13), North America (14-18), Holland (4, 19, 20) and the earlier qualitative and quantitative results from this UK-based study (21)(22)(23)(24)(25)(26). Several of these cross-sectional studies [including our baseline publication, (23)] indicate higher levels of grief and functional impairment among people bereaved during the pandemic, compared with pre-pandemic populations (14)(15)(16)(17)(18)(19)(20).…”