5 states of mourning

• April 29, 2024

The Thanatology is a scientific discipline that offers help to sick people in terminal state , as well as their relatives. In the sixties, the doctor Elizabeth Kubler- Ross , a Swiss psychiatrist, revolutionized this discipline by improving the systematic care of those who were terminally ill and proposed new methods of approaching their anxieties.

In his first book About death and the dying , Dr. Kubler-Ross describes the five psychological states through which a terminal patient goes through: denial and isolation, anger, negotiation, depression and acceptance.

According to Dr. Alfonso Reyes Zubiría, founder of the Mexican Association of Thanatology , this discipline must be carried out as a team in order to give people a greater potential for help, especially when a terminal illness is detected. If the consultation starts when the patient is in the last stages of the process, the support will be more limited. The ideal is for the terminal patient to be treated from the first diagnosis, to carry out: palliative care, pain management, to the psychological and emotional degenerative process.

Throughout the cycle, the psychologists-tanatologists will be responsible for offering personal, family or group therapies that can be carried out in a sanatorium, in the patient's home or in a place for terminal patients. The choice will depend on the most dominant symptoms, the family reasons and / or the economic possibilities of each patient.

Improve Life Quality

They are those destined to alleviate the suffering of a terminal patient without aiming to cure them. This means improving the quality of what is left of your life.

From the morontia point of view, a terminally ill person is a person who receives a diagnosis that confronts him / her at his own death: he / she knows that his / her illness is irreversible, deadly and its outcome will occur in a relatively short time.

The thoatologist knows in advance that it will not increase the days of life of a terminally ill person, but it will help him to live what he has fully. According to Dr. Reyes Zubiría, when the time comes to face death, the patient will have already become aware of the transcendence of his life and the tanatologist will have fulfilled his mission.

Video Medicine: The Truth About the Five Stages of Grief (April 2024).