Good Grief: Insight on SBS

Leslie and I both like to watch Insight on SBS and on 17th April they featured a very timely discussion on grief and how we deal with it. You can watch it online or read the transcript. I really recommend that you do. Not only might it help you understand what we are both going through at the moment (quite a few of the participants had experienced the death of a child) but it will also be a really valuable way to open a discussion amongst your own families and friends about why our culture finds it so difficult to grieve, and how societal attitudes towards it impact upon you when you are in grief's throws.

Specifically, the premise for this show came out of a debate currently being had by the American Psychiatric Association about whether 'complicated' or 'prolonged' grief - in other words an 'abnormal' response to bereavement - should be included as a psychiatric disorder in the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The DSM is the foremost resource used by clinicians throughout the world that sets out psychiatric diagnostic categories and criteria and treatment guidelines.

On the one hand, clinical attention to prolonged grief responses gives people who are suffering in a way that goes beyond the 'ordinary' pangs of longing for a lost loved one the potential for relief that will enable them to again participate in daily life. Though grief is very different to depression, it is known that depression can occur alongside or ensuant to, but at the same time quite separate to, a grief response. 

On the other, to attempt to pathologise grief and to set limits around what is considered 'normal' grief, has the potential to be problematic for people whose experiences fall outside of those proscribed limits. My own experience has shown me that grief has many and varied faces; that there are as many ways to grieve as there are to love.

The participants on the show were deeply ambivalent about whether the inclusion of a bereavement disorder in the DSM was a good thing. By far the majority of those who spoke were very critical of the proposal and rejected the idea that their grief - which many of them considered would last their entire lives - was an affliction that needed to be taken away.

I could relate to that point. I feel, for example, that the grief I have for Max is an expression of my love for him. To be expected to ever get over his death is an attitude that I find distressing and repellant, for I will never stop grieving for him, although the manner in which I grieve may change over time.

I cried during the show as the participants described the impact that the loss of a loved one has had on their lives. Their anguish was hard to watch.

There was the man whose adolescent son committed suicide after prolonged bullying. He desperately clings to his son's memory, to the extent that he keeps his bedroom exactly as it was the day he last saw him.

There was the couple whose three-year-old daughter died in an accident, both of whom expressed the sentiments I mentioned when they spoke of their grief for their daughter representing their love for her.

Then there was a woman whose attitude I found much harder to take. Her nine-year-old daughter died as the result of a tragic train accident. She spoke of how she did not even consider letting herself experience grief for her daughter; that she was able to accept her death as immediately as it happened because she believed in destiny and that her daughter had obviously been meant to die.

This woman was able to intellectualise her feelings in a way that I, and many of the other grieving participants, could not comprehend. She spoke of deciding to not be sad because that is not what her daughter would have wanted. I was watching her and thinking 'if only it were that easy!'

I understood she is at the point where she feels that there are positive things she can do in her daughter's memory that are much more productive than shutting yourself away to scream and cry. I have moments of this myself, despite my overwhelming sadness. However my own experience of grief is so different that I could not understand how she was able to equate her conscious positive re-framing of the grief experience with the very unconscious, unpredictable nature of feelings and emotions. I wondered if this was evidence of a different kind of coping mechanism that externalises and pushes away the pain as opposed to nurturing it and holding it close, as I and many others seem to be doing.

I don't know the answer to that, as I don't know this woman, and I don't know what it is like to have had her experience and to hold her beliefs. But her inclusion on the show really highlighted the fact that it's impossible for us to understand or comprehend another's grief, as much as we might think we can relate or empathise with it. For that reason, as a society, we must not be so quick to judge the ways in which it is acceptable for others to grieve.

The case of Lindy Chamberlain back in the eighties is a case in point about how women, especially, can face extreme consequences for not expressing emotion in expected ways. In that case, the Australian public deemed that Chamberlain had not grieved visibly enough. As Doka and Martin explain in Grieving Beyond Gender: Understanding the Ways Men and Women Mourn, Chamberlain's failure to grieve in a prescribed manner was interpreted as strong evidence of her guilt. She had not grieved for her murdered daughter visibly enough.

An article in The Age on 12th February last year summed it up by neatly by saying (in relation to Julia Gillard's emotive response in parliament to the Queensland floods) "Women damned if they show emotion, damned if they don't".

"Humans are hard-wired to evaluate, assess and judge others, it's part of our survival mechanism. But perhaps we could step back a little and remember that people are different and that their abilities and ways of dealing with emotions vary, too," Gabriella Coslovich writes.

I couldn't agree more.