Franklin Cook's blog

The Childhood Wellbeing Research Centre has published an up-to-date literature review that "provides a brief overview of educational and psychological outcomes for children and young people bereaved of a parent or sibling, and the effectiveness of services provided for this group."

One of the main conclusions of the review "is the importance of a differentiated response to childhood bereavement, taking account of each child's needs and circumstances."

A common message from the research is that effective approaches to supporting bereaved children need to be appropriate to their circumstances, including age and stage of development as well as degree of distress and the presence of protective factors in their environment.

In a book review in the Fall 2011 issue of AAS's "Surviving Suicide" newsletter, editor Ginny Sparrow says the recently published Seeking Hope: Stories of the Suicide Bereaved "is like a support group in your very own home."

Edited by two dedicated women in the suicide prevention field, both Michelle Linn-Gust, Ph.D. and Julie Cerel, Ph.D. share their personal stories through loss by suicide, and recruited 15 other voices to share their journey. All stories possess the gift of time, and it’s encouraging for a newly bereaved reader to have a peek onto the “other side” of sudden loss.

In "How To Help Friends in Mourning," Megan O'Rourke reviews the results of an earlier Slate survey on grief, pinpointing what bereaved people themselves said about their needs.

The most surprising aspect of the results is how basic the expressed needs were, and yet how profoundly unmet many of these needs went. Asked what would have helped them with their grief, the survey-takers talked again and again about acknowledgement of their grief. They wanted recognition of their loss and its uniqueness; they wanted help with practical matters; they wanted active emotional support. What they didn't want was to be offered false comfort in the form of empty platitudes.

The survey results emphasized the following:

In a Boston Globe interview, sociologist Nancy Berns of Drake University shared some of the ideas from her new book Closure: The Rush to End Grief and What It Costs Us. She says,

The closure narrative assumes that grief is bad and that it’s something that needs to end, and it assumes that closure is possible and that it’s something good and something that people need to have. Grief is a difficult, messy experience and can be very painful ... Our grief expresses how we’re feeling and allows us to acknowledge [a] loss. So asking or expecting someone to try and end that quickly is really misunderstanding the importance of those emotions.

The February 2010 issue of EMS Magazine offers a wealth of practical information about being helpful immediately after a suicide that is applicable not only to first responders but also to any caregiver in the aftermath of a suicide fatality.
In "Help Those Left Behind," EMS Magazine's editorial director, Nancy Perry, sets the stage for the magazine's feature treatment of survivor grief with these insightful words:

There's no question that those left behind in the wake of a suicide are as much the victims of the event as the person who has chosen to end his or her life.