Resilience and vulnerability: prolonged grief in the bereaved spouses of marital partners who died of AIDS

Abstract

Spousal bereavement is closely linked to prolonged grief, that is, significant adjustment symptoms that last for more than six months after the loss. This article focused on potential risk and protective factors that may influence bereavement outcomes. Participants in this study were surviving spouses of individuals who died of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). These participants were themselves living with human immunodeficiency syndrome. In this cross-sectional study, 120 bereaved participants completed measures of grief, quality of dying and death of the deceased, negative conceptions of death resulting from AIDS, death attitudes, and personal resilience. The results showed that one-third (35.0%) of the bereaved participants reported grief levels above the prolonged grief cut-off scores, and can be categorized as the "prolonged grief" group. Although quality of dying and death was not associated with the intensity of grief, negative conceptions of death from AIDS, fear of death and resilience independently predicted grief symptoms in the regression models. Our findings provide insight into the grief process for the surviving spouse of AIDS victims in rural China. Since resilience is malleable, developing resilience interventions to enhance adjustment to bereavement may be a promising direction in grief counselling and therapies.

The effects of beliefs about AIDS-related death on quality of life in Chinese married couples with both husband and wife infected with HIV: examining congruence using the actor-partner interdependence model

“…Negative beliefs about AIDS-related death was measured using five items that had been used in a sample of Chinese AIDS-bereaved family members [14]. After they were asked to compare AIDS-related death with that of other illnesses such as cancer and coronary heart disease, the participants indicated their level of agreement (1 = do not agree at all, 5 = agree very much) on five items, “AIDs patients die earlier,” “AIDS patients die with more pain,” “AIDS patients die with less dignity,” “Dying AIDS patients are more miserable,” and “AIDS deceased have shabbier funerals.” The sum score was used to represent negative beliefs about death, with higher scores indicating more negative beliefs.…”

Prolonged Grief Disorder and the Cultural Crisis

“…Finally, a range of other variations on these criteria have revealed different prevalence rates. For instance, studies operationalizing PGD in terms of the CG formulation (Prigerson et al, 1995;Prigerson and Maciejewski, 2005;Shear et al, 2005) find prevalence rates ranging from 9.8 (Tsutsui et al, 2014) to 35% (Yu et al, 2016). And according to Yu et al (2017) almost half of their sample (47.2) met criteria for PGD applying yet another diagnostic algorithm to dichotomize individuals in PGD vs. non-PGD clusters.…”

Affective immunology: where emotions and the immune response converge

“…Most of the studies currently in the literature focus on the effects of chronic negative emotions on the immune system. These can range from divorce and marital problems 85,86 to bereavement [87][88][89] and loneliness. 39,90,91 Surprisingly, however, very little has been published on the effect that positive emotional states have on the immune response.…”