It’s time to let the five stages of grief die (2019) | Hacker News Reader

It’s time to let the five stages of grief die (2019)

mcgill.ca

30 pointsNoturos35 comments

No, I’m sure that can’t be right - the stages of grief are so well known they must be true.

I mean, c’mon - have books and films just been lying to me all this time?!

But maybe it’s not completely wrong - there must be a core of truth to it if it resonates so well. Maybe we can preserve that even if we don’t stick to the specific stages.

But how could I have been fooled by this for so long? What’s wrong with me that I believed it so unquestioningly?

But it’s not just me - this predates awareness of the reproducibility crisis in social sciences. It’s not so surprising that it doesn’t replicate. I’m sure there’s a deeper understanding out there, and this model wasn’t so bad as a stepping stone to that.

As the end of the article also mentions, in a more recent book:

> ... Kübler-Ross remarked that the five stages are “not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or goes in a prescribed order.”

So these are more the possible reactions that someone may have to a grievous event - not everyone will experience all reactions, and also will definitely not go through them in the given order.

A bit forced, and they all sound like denial, but I can see all the stages if I squint.

The five stages of grief belongs in the same circle as hell as the other HR nonsense. It all resonates well but little is based on scientific evidence.

I see what you did there

Are the stages of grief even well known outside the US?

Yes. Half the world away from the US here.

Never encountered it in neither France nor Japan, outside of US entertainment.

Do you read a lot?

>I mean, c’mon - have books and films just been lying to me all this time?!

Or this random internet opinion article does...

Could it be that the fact that the stages are "known" makes for a bleak perspective for whoever is going through them, without a sense of escape from it, and that makes it so that people prefer to attack this perspective in a sense of hoping for these steps to be actually wrong/not true? This to me seems more of a "nah please tell me another story that doesn't make me feel so bad", which I can also understand to a degree, but that doesn't change the realness of those "steps".

Sure. Horoscopes "work" that way, too.

Clapping

All five, in order; nice.

"Alas 5 stages, we hardly knew ye."

>The five stages of grief are ingrained in our cultural consciousness as the natural progression of emotions one experiences after the death of a loved one. However, it turns out that this model is not science-based, does not well describe most people's experiences, and was never even meant to apply to the bereaved.

I find it applies perfectly to what I see happening in all kind of personal grief (for others and for oneself) and unmovable threat settings, so couldn't care less if it was "science based", as long as it's a descriptive observation...

And, yes, obviously, not everybody will feel exactly the same. For an extreme example, some people are sociopaths and might not even feel anything at all, never mind this. Others are very shallow and selfish, and take selfies next to their parents coffins. But this is about a rough matching of what people feel and how they handle grief - not a topographical map of feelings.

The problem is that this is not even a rough matching what people feel.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/supersurvivors/20170...

"In fact, the actual grief process looks a lot less like a neat set of stages and a lot more like a roller coaster of emotions. Even Kubler-Ross said that grief doesn’t proceed in a linear and predictable fashion, writing toward the end of her career that she regretted her stages had been misunderstood."

>In fact, the actual grief process looks a lot less like a neat set of stages and a lot more like a roller coaster of emotions.

Roller-coasters still have a specific route and different stages. I'd say in the same way there can be a prevailing sentiment at each stage of grief, even if this or that sentiment comes and goes at times at all stages.

It is more a disjointed roller coaster. Some stages of grief can be skipped all together or aren't experienced in a linear order.

I think this sibling comment covers my point well:

"Did you ever expect that there were discrete and linear stages? I always assumed that these were emotional “attractors”, different emotional states that we migrated through without any particular vector. More like a cruise through a dismal archipelago."

Metaphors are of course imperfect by their very nature, but more importantly, the phrase “a roller coaster of emotions” isn’t even really a metaphor. It’s a figure of speech that means one is going through a wide range of feelings and/or emotions in a (relatively) short amount of time, possibly in rapid succession or even simultaneously. I think it was used appropriately.

Did you ever expect that there were discrete and linear stages? I always assumed that these were emotional “attractors”, different emotional states that we migrated through without any particular vector. More like a cruise through a dismal archipelago.

There have been criticisms of this "model" for many years, but it has entered the public consciousness, so people assume it to be true. There was even a Simpsons episode where Homer goes thru the 5 stages in 5 minutes. "Everyone talks about it so iut must be true!" school of science.

I have a similar problem with the Heroes Journey, which if you are in fiction/screenplay writing, is considered the Bible, and criticising it is like being a heretic. So much so, many books on writing assume it to be true an starting point. But I always found it to be silly, and recently found a great article that points out its a nonsense made up list of common fantasy tropes:

https://talesoftimesforgotten.com/2020/12/31/the-heros-journ...

It actually IS a valid starting point. Generally when 90% of the stories that humans tell each other fall under certain patterns, it's OK to categorize and label them. That's all that the Hero's Journey that Campbell describes is. You don't have to rebel against them just because they're established and labeled.

This is like people claiming music theory is unnecessary. Jazz, for example, is rooted in music theory. It goes beyond it in very specific ways, but with the actual work put in to understand why.

Understanding the Hero's Journey (or the Story Circle, or the 7-Point Story Structure), and why it works is a critical foundation for moving beyond it.

Understand the Jolly Good Suggestion of Demeter before you code something that violates it. You have to understand the rules to the depth of "why" before your knowledge is deep enough to legitimately go beyond the rules.

Find the box first. Until you do that, you can't think outside of it.

The first paragraph in that arti cle is deeply incorrect and sets Campbell's work up as a strawman, which you unhelpfully perpetuate here in this comment.

Campbell does not "fundamentally claim" anything about "all human stories" in Hero with a Thousand Faces.

He merely points out a commonly recurring pattern among a certain subset of stories (namely, stories about famous heroes) across multiple human societies and cultures, even those with limited cultural overlap.

In fact, his work is like an early version of TV Tropes, giving names to thematically repeating elements of such stories.

You (and that blog's author) should actually read the book before declaring it nonsense.

The version I got never portrayed it as something that's sequential and never 'ends' at acceptance and also not specifically applicable to grieving and it's also not scientific. The way I understood it is that's it's more a repetition of 5 different emotions in random order and over time some of the emotions re-occur less than the others. I think it's useful to help you observe the ways your mind tries to come to terms with things that are emotionally difficult to process, whether it's a car accident, natural disaster, an illness or even losing a loved one.

That said, I certainly do imagine some psychotherapists out there taking the order literally and explaining it like that to their patients.

In reality Kübler-Ross developed her stage model after interviewing many individuals with life-threatening illnesses. It was only the experiences of these patients that she attempted to model.

I actually didn't know this, but that makes a lot more sense.

I always considered this more of a rule of thumb sort of like "when you throw a rock, first it goes up then it goes down"* rather than an exact equation. Like there are different reactions to something bad, they will not always all be present, and the order is not a given, and sometimes they are adaptive (the thing you are denying may in fact not be true, anger may prevent it etc).

* Not just imprecise but even has exceptions. What if you throw it straight down? What if you throw it straight down, and it bounces? What if it achieves escape velocity? What if you throw it down at an angle and it then achieves escape velocity?

The vast majority of Psychological findings do not stand up over time. Of all the science being done they have by far the largest replication issue and some of the findings have caused a lot of medical harm. I don't think it can grow up to objective findings and become properly scientific in most cases so we should for the most part not pay any attention to them they just don't have the proof.

My strategy:

I know I'm going to get over this eventually. I might as well start now.

It helps that I have aphantasia and a very poor autobiographical memory.

I think a better model could be considered. One that ends in acceptance but in which the other coping strategies happen in parallel.

"Not everyone experiences grief in the same way"

What an insight! Its a model, with all that that implies.

As with K&R's C, K-R's grieving model will likely prove a resilient beast.

this almost just appears to be the application of the term 'stages' as in a circuit of sort. As opposed to being independent frames which one may be in or perceiving. couldnt semantics fix this conceptually

The "problems" identified with the Kübler-Ross model seem to be twofold:

- That the popular perception of the model is not what Kuber-Ross herself had in mind and communicated. This can hardly be laid on her.

- That the empirical research, and it was both, has subjective elements and is again interpreted in contradiction of K-R's statements as some specific sequence of phases.

I'd bring to this a few additional observations:

Emotions seem to be common among at least many mammalian species. That is, both that they're a shared inheritence, and an evolutionary one. This isn't a novel observation, and the connection between emotion and evolution was first proposed, at book length, by Charles Darwin in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Expression_of_the_Emotions...>.

Grief is one of those emotions. The notion of animal grief is well developed and much studied (see the Wikipedia overview: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_grief>). It seems highly likely that it serves some positive adaptive purpose.

As studied by K-R, one characterisation of the grief observed was of a profound change in the worldview of the patients themselves. That is, coming face to face with their own mortality or morbidity.

There is also at least an anecdotal understanding of stages of grief being associated with challenges to individual or group worldviews, paradigms, or understandings. This can be seen in, e.g, responses to the notions of limits to growth, in politics, and other social contexts.

What I suspect, though I've not come across any clear expression of this in scholarly literature, is that what we call grief is in actually part of a spectrum of responses to radical shifts in understanding of one's world. And that the stages, or perhaps more accurately phases or expressions relate to unlearning and relearning new patterns. That there's a value in not dropping a particular model too quickly, but that similarly there's not value in blindly holding on to a model which clearly no longer serves any specific use.

The lack of any significant discussion of these elements at least to my knowledge has long struck me as distinctly odd. Checking Google Scholar currently I find at least some theoretical work, e.g., Doka Understanding Grief <https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813155...> and Hall, Bereavement theory <https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02682621.2014.90...>, though by the blurbs, these don't seem to take the leap I'm suggesting.

Very biased piece, written by somebody acutely grieving, and lacking in the very thing she deplores: lack of data except for two select studies that goes in her direction.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com