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There are No Five Stages of Grief

There are No Five Stages of Grief

Atlantic published an article: "There Are No 'Five Stages' of Grief—An expert in medical evidence looks at the science of loss, by Hilda Bastian who is a scientist, writer, and founding member of the Cochrane Collaboration. She was formerly the editor of the PubMed Health project at the National Library of Medicine.

Here are some excerpts:

The internet of grief is crammed with conflicting theories and advice. 

There’s been a huge amount of research on bereavement—a search of just one biomedical database turns up about 10,000 papers published in the past 10 years—but I found it rife with unreliable results from tiny, problematic studies. 

As is true in many areas of psychology and medicine, a mass of studies has formed into a giant smorgasbord from which one can pick and choose results to fit any narrative, even when the weight of the evidence points another way. 

Theories based on the flimsiest data—or on none at all—have shaped how people think about their own and others’ grief.

For this article Dr. Bastain delved into the so-called stages of grief…….denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance….  

The five-stage model wasn’t generated from data. It’s a theory, developed by the psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and published in 1969, that explains how people come to terms with their own impending death. 

By the time her second book was published, in 1974, Kübler-Ross had expanded her claims, such that the five stages would apply to the grieving process too. Families go through them once while their loved one faces death, she argued—and then they may again when that person has died.

The five stages, so the theory goes, aren’t simply bidirectional either; they can also come on out of sequence, or with stages skipped over. 

Plenty of researchers, practicing psychologists, and expert panels have given up on Kübler-Ross’s theory; some have called for it to be “relegated to the realms of history.” 

Already by the early 1980s, a U.S. Institute of Medicine committee cautioned “against the use of the word ‘stages’ to describe the bereavement process,” as it might “result in inappropriate behavior toward the bereaved, including hasty assessments of where individuals are or ought to be in the grieving process.” 

And a few years after that report, the research psychologists Camille Wortman and Roxane Silver thoroughly debunked the five-stage model, noting, for example, that most people don’t experience depression after bereavement. 

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