Emotional needs of the dying

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32406, 19 September 1970, Page 11

Emotional needs of the dying

NEW YORK. A group of American doctors is conducting intense research into the emotional needs of the dying patient and his

family. The doctors are founders of a new specialty, thanatology, which is the study of dying and its medical and psychological effects. They are the editors of a 398-page report published by Columbia University Press. It is meant to serve as a text for the medical educator and physician to help them to manage the emotional state of those facing death.

■‘There is a problem in our society at the present time that stems from the preoccupation of death denial,'* s- : d Dr Bernard Schoenberg, assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at Columbia Uni-

versity's College of Physicians and Surgeons, who is one of the editors of the report. “We don’t even say people are dying,” Dr Schoenberg continued. “We say they are ‘passing away.’ This is true of the clergy too.

“We are also pre-occupied with vitality and beauty and the size of a woman’s busts and other things that show perpetual life. “Add to this the fact that death no longer occurs in the home but in clean, sterile hospitals and old-age homes, and the decline in religious belief, almost all of which had a concept of afterlife that made death seem less permanent and painful, and the problem is intensified."

The problem of denial spills over into the medical profession, according to Dr Austin H. Kitcher, another editor of the report, because the physician feels deep guilt when the patient dies.

Subconsciously, he feels as though he had not done his job properly. Because no-one will discuss the problem realistically, the editors say, the emotional drains of death are much more trying than they need be.

Thanatology began as a formal discipline in 1967 as a result of a personal experience with death by Dr Kitscher, whose first wife died of cancer.

During his illness, he neglected a medical problem of his own, resulting in hospital treatment and surgery two months after her death. While he was in the hospital other doctors consoled him and began to look for medical literature telling how to cope with bereavement. There was little available. After his recovery, Dr Kitscher and other doctors at Columbia began investigating in depth the reaction to death.

They wrote to people all over the country—doctors, nurses, sociologists, specialists on etiquette—and asked them to investigate the subject.

This resulted in the formation of the foundation of thanatology, a non-profit, national educational organisation based at Columbia. The foundation has already been responsible for the publication of two other books on the subject, and will hold its first symposium soon. Besides the emotional effect of death, the report explores the biological consequences on the bereaved. One English study cited showed a 10 per cent greater deathrate among close relatives of dead persons a year after death, compared with the rate of a matched control group.

Two other studies show a greater incidence of cancer among the bereaved of all ages. Associated Newspapers Feature Services.