Adaptant son podcast consacré à la mort, l'auteure brise les tabous autour de la mort, du deuil et des rites funéraires en revenant sur les croyances, les peurs et les fantasmes qui les entourent, dans le monde et à travers l'histoire.
Cet ouvrage invite à la réflexion sur les super-héros et leur rapport à la mort : assassinat de parents, destruction de la planète, hommage à une idole décédée, entre autres. Chaque personnage fait de son deuil une armure et utilise le masque pour dissimuler son identité qui devient mortuaire afin d'effrayer ses ennemis, de survivre à un génocide ou de revenir d'entre les morts comme spectres.
De Stéphane Mallarmé, qui disait du Styx qu’il était un peu profond ruisseau, à Gérard de Nerval, l’auteur étudie la mort dans la littérature, que celle-ci soit naturelle, brutale, discrète ou détaillée.
Ce petit ouvrage donne une réflexion sur le temps qui passe, la mort et la mémoire, considérant le cimetière comme un refuge éloigné de la frénésie du monde.
Cette BD présente neuf récits humoristiques explorant avec ironie la présence de la mort dans la culture contemporaine, au travers du rapport obsessif qu’entretient l’auteure avec elle depuis son enfance.
Ce recueil de strips, empreints d’humour, de mélancolie et de poésie, met en scène divers personnages incarnant la mort. Elle médite sur sa mission et sur le regard que les hommes portent sur elle.
IMPORTANCE: In the Kilimanjaro region of Tanzania, there are no advance care planning (ACP) protocols being used to document patient preferences for end-of-life (EoL) care. There is a general avoidance of the topic and contemplating ACP in healthcare-limited regions can be an ethically complex subject. Nonetheless, evidence from similar settings indicate that an appropriate quality of life is valued, even as one is dying. What differs amongst cultures is the definition of a 'good death'.
OBJECTIVE: Evaluate perceptions of quality of death and advance EoL preparation in Moshi, Tanzania.
DESIGN: 13 focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted in Swahili using a semi-structured guide. These discussions were audio-recorded, transcribed, translated, and coded using an inductive approach.
SETTING: Kilimanjaro Christian Medical Centre (KCMC), referral hospital for northern Tanzania.
PARTICIPANTS: A total of 122 participants, including patients with life-threatening illnesses (34), their relatives/friends (29), healthcare professionals (29; HCPs; doctors and nurses), and allied HCPs (30; community health workers, religious leaders, and social workers) from KCMC, or nearby within Moshi, participated in this study.
FINDINGS: In characterizing Good Death, 7 first-order themes emerged, and, of these themes, Religious & Spiritual Wellness, Family & Interpersonal Wellness, Grief Coping & Emotional Wellness, and Optimal Timing comprised the second-order theme, EoL Preparation and Life Completion. The other first-order themes for Good Death were Minimal Suffering & Burden, Quality of Care by Formal Caregivers, and Quality of Care by Informal Caregivers.
INTERPRETATION: The results of this study provide a robust thematic description of Good Death in northern Tanzania and they lay the groundwork for future clinical and research endeavors to improve the quality of EoL care at KCMC.
BACKGROUND: As the global population ages, palliative care is ever more essential to provide care for patients with incurable chronic conditions. However, in many countries, doctors are not prepared to care for dying patients. Palliative care education should be an urgent concern for all medical schools all around the world, including Latin America and Brazil. Advances in palliative care education require robust assessment tools for constant evaluation and improvement of educational programmes. Bandura's social cognitive theory proposes that active learning processes are mediated by self-efficacy and associated outcome expectancies, both crucial elements of developing new behaviour. The Self-Efficacy in Palliative Care (SEPC) and Thanatophobia Scales were developed using Bandura's theory to assess the outcomes of palliative care training.
OBJECTIVES: We aimed to translate and validate these scales for Brazilian Portuguese to generate data on how well doctors are being prepared to meet the needs of their patients.
DESIGN: Cross-sectional study.
SETTING: One Brazilian medical school.
PARTICIPANTS: Third-year medical students.
METHODS: The authors translated the scales following the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer's recommendations and examined their psychometric properties using data collected from a sample of 111 students in a Brazilian medical school in 2017.
RESULTS: The Brazilian versions of SEPC and Thanatophobia Scales showed good psychometric properties, including confirmatory factor analysis, replicating the original factors (factor range: 0.51-0.90), and acceptable values of reliability (Cronbach's alpha: 0.82-0.97 and composite reliability: 0.82-0.96). Additionally, the Brazilian versions of the scales showed concurrent validity, demonstrated through a significant negative correlation.
CONCLUSIONS: The Brazilian version of the scales may be used to assess the impact of current undergraduate training and identify areas for improvement within palliative care educational programmes. The data generated allow Brazilian researchers to join international conversations on this topic and educators to develop tailored pedagogical approaches.
Dans cet album, la Mort est un personnage bienveillant et attentionné. Son travail est d'aller chercher tous ceux qui vont mourir - vieux ou jeunes, insectes ou éléphants. Son rôle est indispensable, parce que sans elle il n'y aurait pas assez de place pour que de nouvelles vies puissent voir le jour. La Mort accomplit sa tâche avec le plus de soin et de douceur possible. Elle fait partie de la vie, de l'amour, et de nous tous.
Sébastien, en 4e dans un collège de ZEP, est atteint d'une sclérose en plaques. Il est persuadé qu'il va en mourir... Entre ses copains, la fille dont il est amoureux, ses parents (une mère surprotectrice et un père démissionnaire) et ses crises, il est en survie permanente, sans espoir et sans but, jusqu'à l'arrivée dans la classe d'un enfant soldat du Congo, qui détourne son pôle d'attraction et le force à sortir de sa morbidité chronique en le révélant à lui-même.
The use of multidimensional scales for assessing fear of death among nursing students can assist in teaching and evaluating the effectiveness of targeted training in thanatology. Research has demonstrated good psychometric characteristics of the Czech version of the Collett–Lester Fear of Death Scale (CL-FODS). It was applied to nursing students (N = 256), who reported as their biggest fear the process of their own dying. Greater fear of death and dying was found in students who had no experience of the dying and death of a loved one. Good internal consistency was achieved for the four subscales of the Czech CL-FODS.
The aim of this cross-sectional study was to investigate attitudes of New Zealanders toward death and dying. We administered an online version of Collett–Lester Fear of Death Scale and Concerns about Dying Instrument subscales to a representative sample of the New Zealand population. One thousand one people responded to the survey, where the largest age-group lay between 30 and 39 years. Respondents with strong religious beliefs showed strongest agreement to being anxious about their own death compared to those who have no religious beliefs (p = .0005). Conversely, participants with strong spiritual beliefs did not feel anxious about dying (=.0005). Participants with strong family connections believed their religion/spirituality helped them think about death compared to those with weak family connections (p > .0001). Our findings show that strong religious beliefs significantly predict higher levels of death anxiety compared to participants with strong spiritual beliefs. This is probably due to the cultural identity of those sampled.
Is it possible to end one’s life well with dementia? The perception of dementia as death brought into life flows from ideas about humanness embedded in medicine’s Cartesian paradigm. Dementia as incurable brain disease exacerbates negativity. But the real impact of dementia is that it changes social relations: to live well with dementia requires a relational not Cartesian understanding of life. A relational ontology prioritizes social health: to live is to be held in connection. Negativity produces the disconnection that is death, with or without disease. When people with dementia are held in connection, they live a better life.
Death metaphors are a meaningful way to understand personal perceptions of death, an important construct affecting how people live. This study collected death metaphor data among 100 university students in Hong Kong in 2016 and compared the findings with another study reported in 2004. Interpersonally oriented death metaphors were still popular among students a decade later. There was a general decrease in positive perception of death and an increase in negative perception of death from 2004 to 2016. Death metaphors are useful tools in death education programs, especially in cultures where death is a taboo topic.
Background: The death of a child can have significant emotional effects on doctors responsible for their care. Trainee doctors working in the paediatric intensive care unit (PICU) may be particularly vulnerable. The aim of this study was to examine the emotional impact of, and grief reactions to, a child's death in PICU trainee doctors, along with coping strategies they used.
Methods: In a prospective, cross-sectional, observational study, qualitative and quantitative data were recorded on anonymised, written questionnaires. Grief severity was assessed using the Texas Revised Inventory of Grief. Emotional impact was assessed using the shortened Impact of Event Scale. The BriefCOPE tool was used to assess coping strategies. Qualitative data was analysed using conventional content analysis. Data are presented as median (inter-quartile range) or number (%).
Results: All invited trainee doctors (23 anaesthetists; 5 paediatricians) completed the questionnaire (age, 30 [29-34] yr; 13/28 [46%] female). Two (7%) doctors experienced severe grief (Texas Revised Inventory of Grief score <39), with five (18%) doctors severely affected by the deaths as measured by the Impact of Event Scale. Qualitative analysis revealed prominent themes of sadness, helplessness, guilt, shock, and concern for the bereaved family. There was limited use of coping strategies. Speaking with another trainee doctor was the principal coping strategy. Requests for debriefing sessions, greater psychological support and follow-up with the patient's family were frequently suggested.
Conclusions: Paediatric deaths evoke significant grief and emotional reactions in a subset of PICU trainee doctors. Trainee PICU doctors highlighted a lack of professional support and tailored debriefs.
This paper focuses on the practice of injecting patients who are dying with a relatively high dose of sedatives in response to a catastrophic event that will shortly precipitate death, something that we term 'crisis sedation.' We first present a confabulated case that illustrates the kind of events we have in mind, before offering a more detailed account of the practice. We then comment on some of the ethical issues that crisis sedation might raise. We identify the primary value of crisis sedation as allowing healthcare professionals to provide some degree of reassurance to patients, their families and the professionals who are caring for them. Next we focus on the issue of informed consent. Finally, we ask whether continuous deep sedation might be preferable to crisis sedation in scenarios where potential catastrophic events can be anticipated.
The goal of the presented research was to investigate if wisdom plays a mediating role in the relationships between meaning in life and the attitude toward death in the period of middle and late adulthood. A study was carried out that included 567 persons aged 40 to 75 years. Three measures were used: Personal Meaning Profile, Three-Dimensional Wisdom Scale, and Death Attitude Profile-Revised. The conducted analyses allowed the authors to confirm the mediating role of wisdom in the relationships between meaning in life and fear of death as well as death avoidance in persons during the period of middle and late adulthood.
Humans were once considered unique in having a concept of death but a growing number of observations of animal responses to dying and dead conspecifics suggests otherwise. Complex arrays of behaviors have been described ranging from corpse removal and burial among social insects to quiet attendance and caregiving among elephants and primates. Less frequently described, however, are behavioral responses of individuals from different age/sex classes or social position toward the death of conspecifics. We describe behavioral responses of mountain gorillas (Gorilla beringei beringei) to the deaths of a dominant silverback and a dominant adult female from the same social group in Volcanoes National Park in Rwanda and the responses of Grauer's gorillas (Gorilla b. graueri) to the corpse of an extra-group silverback in Kahuzi-Biega National Park, Democratic Republic of Congo. In gorillas, interactions between groups or with a lone silverback often result in avoidance or aggression. We predicted that: (i) more individuals should interact with the corpses of same-group members than with the corpse of the extra-group silverback; (ii) adult females with infants should avoid the corpse of the extra-group silverback; and (iii) in the mountain gorilla cases, individuals that shared close social relationships with the dead individual should spend more time with the corpse than other individuals in the group. We used a combination of detailed qualitative reports, photos, and videos to describe all occurrences of affiliative/investigative and agonistic behaviors observed at the corpses. We observed similar responses toward the corpses of group and extra-group individuals. Animals in all three cases showed a variety of affiliative/investigative and agonistic behaviors directed to the corpses. Animals of all age/sex classes interacted with the corpses in affiliative/investigative ways but there was a notable absence of all adult females at the corpse of the extra-group silverback. In all three cases, we observed only silverbacks and blackbacks being agonistic around and/or toward the corpses. In the mountain gorilla cases, the individuals who spent the most time with the corpses were animals who shared close social relationships with the deceased. We emphasize the similarity in the behavioral responses around the corpses of group and extra-group individuals, and suggest that the behavioral responses were influenced in part by close social relationships between the deceased and certain group members and by a general curiosity about death. We further discuss the implications close interactions with corpses have for disease transmission within and between gorilla social groups.
We examined whether subjective nearness-to-death is associated with negative attitudes toward people with disabilities, and whether attachment patterns moderate this connection. A total of 462 Israeli adults, average age 57 years, completed scales measuring subjective nearness-to-death, negative attitudes toward people with disability, and attachment patterns. High levels of subjective nearness-to-death were associated with negative attitudes toward people with disability, and attachment patterns were significant moderators. Findings point to the theoretical importance of both perceptions of death and personal resources for coping with subjective nearness-to-death in relation to attitudes toward individuals with disabilities.