Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement

Thompson, Neil; Cox, Gerry R.

doi:10.4324/9781315453859

Cited by 23 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…We exist within a network of interdependent relationships and the loss of someone from this network is powerful in emphasising this interdependence. Thus, at the bottom of what we call grief is an expression of our fear of aloneness, a personal vulnerability that is further aggravated by living within a cultural framework that makes us uncomfortable to admit to this revelation (Thompson and Cox, 2017). To have cultivated a society that so customarily pulls back from grief seems at odds with the inscrutable status of it as something that we will all experience at some point.…”

Section: Understanding Grief Sociologicallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Work after Death: An Examination of the Relationship between Grief, Emotional Labour, and the Lived Experience of Returning to Work after a Bereavement

Pitimson

2020

Sociological Research Online

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The lived experience of returning to work after a bereavement remains relatively under researched. Within sociology, the notion of emotional labour has been explored at length, but the place and experience of grief in the workplace is less well understood. This research, framed by Hochschild’s work on feeling rules, focuses on professional individuals working in UK companies who agreed to discuss their experiences of returning to work after a bereavement, in terms of dealing with their own emotions and those of their colleagues, as well as navigating company policy in the area of compassionate leave. Qualitative data from seven semi-structured interviews were analysed, exposing key common emotional and experiential themes, particularly regarding disenfranchised grief, comfort in the familiarity of the work environment, and the impact of silent or awkward responses from colleagues. The emergent themes from the data were used to address the research objective of examining the relationship between grief, emotional labour, and the lived experience of returning to work after a bereavement.

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Section: Understanding Grief Sociologicallymentioning

confidence: 99%

Work after Death: An Examination of the Relationship between Grief, Emotional Labour, and the Lived Experience of Returning to Work after a Bereavement

Pitimson

2020

Sociological Research Online

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“…Disenfranchised grief has been defined as "grief that persons experience when they incur a loss that is not or cannot be openly acknowledged, socially sanctioned or publicly mourned" (Doka, 1989, p. 4). Expanding on this, Thompson and Doka (2017) wrote that, "it is fundamentally a social phenomenon, in so far as it arises as a result of social expectations and the moral and cultural frameworks that underpin those expectations" (p. 177). Disenfranchised grief has been most commonly applied to bereavements from suicide and AIDS (Valentine et al, 2016) but, more recently, it has been suggested that bereavement through substance use is another example of this socially constructed phenomenon (Livingston, 2017;Valentine et al, 2016).…”

Section: Understanding Bereavement Through Substance Usementioning

confidence: 99%

Developing Peer Support for Adults Bereaved Through Substance Use

Standing

Dickie

Templeton

2018

Illness, Crisis & Loss

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The impacts of a bereavement through substance use are many and profound and include guilt, loneliness, stigma, and mixed responses from professionals and others. It seems that those who are bereaved in this way have a particular and unique experience of grief, which many feel is disenfranchised. Support needs to be credible as well as effective, yet up until now little specialist help has been available. In particular, help from a peer who has been there brings authenticity, can lead to the sense of a safe space where those bereaved feel listened to in an empathic manner, and permit the expression of grief which is often disenfranchised. The article is structured around the experiences of someone bereaved through alcohol use who went on to volunteer for a peer support project. Her powerful testimony articulates the wider findings of two recent United Kingdom projects (one includes the peer support project) conducted by the authors.

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“…[7][8][9][10][11][12] In mourning, people are seen to negotiate and work through their losses, often with the help of rituals that are an integrated part of cultures. [13][14][15] By implication, such mourning is perceived as a way to overcome the disorderly, melancholic reaction to loss. 16 17 Systematic empirical studies of melancholy and mourning echo this pathological logic.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…15. N. Thompson and G.R. Cox (2017) , Handbook of the Sociology of Death Grief, and Bereavement: A Guide to Theory and Practice (Taylor & Francis).…”

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confidence: 99%

Beyond pathology: women’s lived experiences of melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment

2019

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Throughout history, melancholy and mourning are predominantly understood within the tradition of psychopathology. Herein, melancholy is perceived as an ailing response to significant loss, and mourning as a healing experience. By taking the philosophies of Freud, Ricoeur and Kristeva together with relevant social scientific research as a theoretical framework and by drawing on women's accounts of melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment, we offer an exploration of melancholy and mourning beyond this pathological ailing/healing logic. We do so by asking what it means for women to actually live with melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment. In answering this question, we show that women in infertility treatment may have different kinds of melancholic longings: they desire their lost time as a pregnant woman, lost love life and lost future. Within these longings, women derive their sense of self predominantly from their lost past: they understand themselves as the mothers or lovers they once were or could have been. We further reveal that some of these women attempt to escape this dwelling of identity and mourn their losses by (re) narrating their pasts or through performing rituals. While these results show how melancholy and mourning are coshaped in relation to these women's embodied, temporal, sociocultural and material lived context, they also give insight into how melancholy and mourning may be understood beyond infertility treatment. We reveal how the binary dynamic between melancholy and mourning is inherently ambiguous: melancholy instigates a joyous painfulness, something that is or is not overcome through the agonising exertion of mourning. We show, moreover, that underlying this melancholy/ mourning dynamic is a pressing and uncontrollable reality of not being able to make (sufficient) sense of oneself. At the end of this work, then, we argue that it follows out of these conclusions' urgency to have context-sensitive compassionate patience with those who live with melancholy and mourning.

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Handbook of the Sociology of Death, Grief, and Bereavement

Cited by 23 publications

References 3 publications

Work after Death: An Examination of the Relationship between Grief, Emotional Labour, and the Lived Experience of Returning to Work after a Bereavement

Work after Death: An Examination of the Relationship between Grief, Emotional Labour, and the Lived Experience of Returning to Work after a Bereavement

Developing Peer Support for Adults Bereaved Through Substance Use

Beyond pathology: women’s lived experiences of melancholy and mourning in infertility treatment

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