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This paper explores how ‘recovery’ from grief is negotiated in bereavement care practice in England. What constitutes recovery from grief remains contested in bereavement research and practice. In this paper, I outline some of the debates in the literature concerning what constitutes recovery following bereavement before presenting interview data from bereavement counsellors and support workers to discover how practitioners negotiate recovery following bereavement in practice. The findings show mixed responses to the use of the term recovery. I highlight six components that emerged across the accounts and that the participants agreed were important to the success of bereavement counselling. However, rather than provide an empirical basis for recovery, the findings in this paper reveal the conflicts and ambiguities that exist in bereavement care practice.

Bereavement, due to the loss of a significant person through death, presents imprisoned persons with a unique challenge, yet so very little is known about the experience of bereavement behind bars. This paper, based on a qualitative practitioner-research study, explores the experience of bereavement in prison through drawing on the author's counselling work with bereaved male inmates of a Scottish prison and focussing on the bereavement experience as lived and described by one client in his own words. The paper depicts the experience of bereavement behind bars as deeply distressing and despairing. It portrays how the powerful sociocultural prescriptions of the prison environment can cause the grief of prison inmates to be profoundly disenfranchised and demonstrates how this can impact hugely negatively on their coping ability. The paper calls for the development of support systems to ensure a level of bereavement care more attuned to the needs of imprisoned persons.

This paper outlines a day-long group intervention for children over the Christmas period who have experienced the loss of a family member. Christmas can be a painful time for children and families ...

Family members bereaved after a violent death may be prevented from seeing visual images such as photographs of the body or closed circuit television footage of the person at the scene of death taken as part of the investigation. However, there is little information on the helpfulness or otherwise of supported exposure to such, often graphic, visual evidentiary material contained in police reports. We draw on a case study approach to explore the lived experience of two bereaved family members and the practice experience of the social work authors to understand the meanings of seeing these visual images. These lived-practice experiences suggest that seeing such visual images, in the context of support, may provide a deeper understanding of the death event and facilitate a sense of peace for bereaved relatives. This paper contributes an insight into the meanings and benefits as well as the practice challenges of viewing such material which, it is argued, are differently experienced from seeing the b...

A key challenge for service providers and practitioners in the field of bereavement is to match clients’ varied needs with equally diverse approaches to care. In order to provide these appropriate and effective interventions, it is crucial to have a reliable means of assessing levels of vulnerability in bereaved clients. The Range of Response to Loss model (RRL) and Adult Attitude to Grief scale (AAG) have evolved as practice tools able to profile the variable nature of client grief by identifying the initially instinctive reactions to loss alongside more aware coping responses. This paper describes the theoretical concepts which underpin the AAG, and recent research which confirms the factor structure of the scale and its capacity to identify varied levels of vulnerability. The application of the AAG to practice as an assessment/ outcome tool and guide to intervention are set out and future developments such as potential inclusion in the CORE IMS discussed.

In this paper we argue that anatomical pathology technologists (APTs) have been overlooked as a key group of healthcare practitioners who play a role in bereavement care. Drawing on an ethnographic case study of a mortuary team in a large urban hospital, we examine the technical and emotional components of the APT role, including how the concept of patient care is utilised in the mortuary. We argue that their work with other healthcare practitioners and professionals illustrates how APTs offer a ‘bridge’ between the immediacy of a death, after-death care and subsequent viewing of the deceased person, thereby providing a vital and under-acknowledged service for bereaved people. We conclude that through education and the promotion of mortuary activities APTs are developing a ‘community of practice’ that moves beyond an outdated perception of ‘dirty work’ towards a more enlightened vision of mortuary settings and APTs as important components of hospital-based bereavement care services.

As an exploration of alternative approaches to thinking about grief, this paper raises fundamental questions about the nature of grief. Is grief one thing or many? Can we theorize about grief in ways that better take into account its complex tangle of feelings and thoughts, its ambiguity, its differences across people, its changes over time, and the diverse ways in which different people talk about their bereavement? Can we capture the sensitivity of the qualitative researcher and the clinician in conceptualizing the grieving of a particular individual and the diversity of grieving across individuals? In the dialogue, ‘grief’ is discussed as an ‘ontological metaphor’ as opposed to a real reality. Questions are raised about how to theorize about the grief of people who use particular metaphors in talking about their grieving, and two examples are explored, the metaphor of the hole and the metaphor of the journey.

This paper reports on PhD research that investigated parental experience of stillbirth. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 10 couples and 12 mothers, it argues that while the experience of stillbirth is, to some extent, a stigmatising one – parents recount feeling like failures and report social difficulties after the loss (Murphy, 2009) – there are positives that may be taken from the experience. These, however, are more likely to emerge in the medium and longer term. Far from being ‘passive victims of prejudice’ (Shih, 2004), some parents may be empowered to take action to improve local and, in some cases, national maternity services, as well as raising people's awareness of stillbirth and breaking the silence that surrounds it.

Bereavement and mourning frequently occur as subjects in fiction and poetry. This paper, based on a larger piece of research, explores mourning as it is articulated in film. Starting with an overview of literary and cinematic representations of loss through the 20th and into the 21st century, it uses the 2008 film Genova as a case study, demonstrating both how this particular film depicts grief in the context of the psychoanalytic and bereavement literature, and how the medium's particular qualities are especially suited to depict the bereavement experience. Cinema, it argues, may itself offer a powerful therapeutic means for the bereaved to explore their own experience.

Unmarried partners of soldiers who have died on active duty in Israel have traditionally been excluded from the recognised ‘family of bereaved’. They may be seen as a distinct group of disenfranchised mourners. A non-government organisation (The Amuta) was created in 1997 to provide emotional support, counselling, and remembrance ceremonies to these young men and women. The support offered aims both to acknowledge their loss and help them plan for the future. This paper reports the findings from a small-scale quantitative study of the experiences of some of the people who have sought help from The Amuta. The model of care it describes may be helpful to people bereaved in similar situations in other countries.

Asylum-seekers and refugees have usually sustained multiple losses by the time they arrive in the host country – their homeland, personal possessions, their occupation and traditional way of life. Many are fleeing persecution and death as a result of their ethnicity or religious beliefs. War or civil unrest may have led to the murders of their families. In many cases these atrocities have been witnessed by the refugee, leading to complicated bereavements. Survivor guilt may make it difficult for the person to move forward. In order to help this client group, bereavement counsellors need to familiarise themselves with the belief systems and mourning rituals of people from a wide range of cultures, as well as the features of traumatic bereavement and the new skills of working with an interpreter. This paper offers an introduction to this complex work, drawing on the literature and composite examples from the author's therapeutic work.

Recent decades have seen a shift in the focus of bereavement research from the mental and physical health consequences of bereavement to the exploration of the protective qualities that help people cope with loss. In this paper Margaret Stroebe reviews the literature produced by both camps and concludes that the pendulum may have swung too far. The literature indicates that the vast majority of bereaved people are, indeed, resilient and will cope without intervention. But policy-makers and health and social care practitioners need also to know that bereavement is associated with excess risk of early death and physical and psychological health problems. Psycho-social intervention should focus on such 'at-risk’ groups.

This paper reports on some early results from an ongoing study exploring the experience of dose relatives of either seeing or not seeing a loved one's body after a sudden and unexpected death, and how this affected them 6–10 months later. The findings are discussed in the context of the author's clinical knowledge and experience gained facilitating choices about viewing for families after a sudden bereavement, in a large forensic mortuary in Sydney.

Children whose parents die often become the responsibility of other family members; In the United States culture these are usually maternal grandmothers and aunts. Whether or not these new caretakers want to take on this responsibility, they often feel required to do so. Thus people who themselves are in mourning sometimes feel forced into a parental role which they did not want. Not surprisingly, their performance as substitute parents often reflects the intense inner conflict which they feel about taking on this role. This paper reviews experience gained from work with 51 maternally-bereaved children and the relatives who take care of them who were seen in the Childhood Loss Program over the past five years. We describe assessment and treatment issues encountered in work with these children and their caretakers. Common problems include the caretakers' ambivalent feelings towards the children, towards the dead mothers, and towards the fathers. These are addressed in treatment which oscillates ba...