OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying

The relationship between death attitudes and life regret was examined in college students. Two types of regret, past-related regret and future-related regret, were defined and measured. The results confirmed the hypothesis, based on a comprehensive model of death anxiety, that both types of regret independently predict fear and avoidance of death. Other background and self variables may affect death anxiety, usually indirectly, by influencing the two types of regret. Death acceptance, on the other hand, was found to be influenced directly by intrinsic religious motivation and indirectly by other background and self variables.

The impact of client suicidal behavior on mental health social workers is slowly receiving increased empirical attention. This qualitative study examined the impact of client suicide on social workers. Results indicate that social workers experience multiple personal and professional reactions immediately following a client suicide completion. Long-term effects, such as the continual experience of emotional reactions and permanent behavior changes, including changing practice strategies, are also reported. The results of this study have significant implications for the preparation of social workers and other mental health therapists for practice with suicidal clients.

The affective effect of suicide on people around is assessed with the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), and some correlates are examined to identify characteristics of the bereaved individuals who score high on depression. We used the informants of 66 suicides as subjects for study and the informants of 66 living people as the control group. For each suicide and living person, we interviewed two informants: one family member and one friend. Data collection was accomplished in China in the summer of 2003. Results indicate that the bereaved people (informants of the suicides) are more likely to experience depression than those people in the control group. The closer the relationship to the suicide, the higher the degree of depression. While the survivor's education and income are negatively correlated with his or her depression level, neither age nor gender is a predictor of depression in the sample. Given the strong relationship between suicide and depression, the bereaved survivors of suicide could be a high risk group of suicide. Further and larger study is warranted to investigate more details of the high risk group so as to recommend prevention measures.

The topic of euthanasia has been a matter of public debate for several decades. Although empirical research should inform policy, scale measurement is lacking. After analyzing shortcomings of previous work, we offer a systematically designed scale to measure attitudes toward euthanasia. We attempt to encompass previously unspecified dimensions of the phenomenon that are central to the euthanasia debate. The results of our pretest show that our attitude towards euthanasia (ATE) scale is both reliable and valid. We delineate active and passive euthanasia, no chance for recovery and severe pain, and patient's autonomy and doctor's authority. We argue that isolating these factors provides a more robust scale capable of better analyzing sample variance. Internal consistency is established with Cronbach's alpha = .871. Construct external consistency is established by correlating the scale with other predictors such as race and spirituality.

Cohen and Mannarino (2004) define childhood traumatic grief (CTG) as “a condition in which trauma symptoms impinge on children's ability to negotiate the normal grieving process” (p. 819). Brown and Goodman (2005) add further clarification, “According to our current understanding of CTG and normal grief, thoughts and images of a traumatic nature are so terrifying, horrific, and anxiety provoking that they cause the child to avoid and shut out these thoughts and images that would be comforting reminders of the person who died. In contrast, a child who does not have intrusive reminders, or who did not experience the death as traumatic, is able to access the person in memory in a manner that is positive and beneficial to integrating the death in his or her total life experience” (pp. 255, 257). The distressing and intrusive images, reminders, and thoughts of the traumatic circumstances of the death, along with the physiological hyperarousal associated with such re-experiencing, prevent the child from proceeding in a healthy way with the grieving process. In addition, while such children are ordinarily excluded from studies of empirically validated treatment studies because of severity and co-morbidity of their conditions, clinicians often see youngsters where traumatic death has been superimposed on a history of multiple losses and in some cases socio-cultural trauma and/or major psychiatric disorders in the child or family. The projective drawing and storytelling strategies and the evocative technique described in this article are intended to offer clinicians additional tools to deal with such seriously impacted youth so that the trauma work can be approached in the relative safety of symbolism and metaphor prior to directly confronting the trauma events.