Melbourne Ageing Research Collaboration, National Ageing Research Institute, Melbourne, Australia.
Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences, University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Australia.
Age Ageing. 2022 Mar 1;51(3). doi: 10.1093/ageing/afac030.
Older people are more likely to experience bereavements than any other age group. However, in healthcare and society, their grief experiences and support needs receive limited attention. Through innovative, arts-based research poetry, this study aimed to capture older people's bereavement stories and the effects of grief on their physical and mental health.
Semi-structured in-depth interviews with 18 bereaved older adults were analysed using thematic and poetic narrative analysis, following a five-step approach of immersion, creation, critical reflection, ethics and engagement.
Research poems were used to illustrate three themes of bereavement experiences among older adults: feeling unprepared, accumulation of losses and ripple effects of grief. While half of participants reported that the death of their family member was expected, many felt unprepared despite having experienced multiple bereavements throughout their life. Instead, the accumulation of losses had a compounding effect on their health and well-being. While these ripple effects of grief focussed on emotional and mental health consequences, many also reported physical health effects like the onset of a new condition or the worsening of an existing one. In its most extreme form, grief was connected with a perceived increased mortality risk.
By using poetry to draw attention to the intense and often long-lasting effects of grief on older people's health and well-being, this article offers emotional, engaging and immersive insights into their unique bereavement experiences and thereby challenges the notion that grief has an expiry date.
老年人比其他任何年龄段的人都更有可能经历丧亲之痛。然而，在医疗保健和社会中，他们的悲伤经历和支持需求却没有得到足够的关注。本研究通过创新的、以艺术为基础的诗歌研究，旨在捕捉老年人的丧亲故事以及悲伤对他们身心健康的影响。
对 18 名丧亲的老年人进行半结构化深入访谈，采用主题和诗歌叙事分析方法，按照沉浸、创作、批判性反思、伦理和参与五个步骤进行分析。
研究诗歌被用来展示老年人丧亲经历的三个主题：感觉毫无准备、损失的积累和悲伤的涟漪效应。虽然一半的参与者报告说他们的家庭成员的死亡是可以预见的，但许多人感到毫无准备，尽管他们一生中经历了多次丧亲之痛。相反，损失的积累对他们的健康和幸福感产生了累积效应。虽然悲伤的这些涟漪效应集中在情绪和心理健康后果上，但许多人也报告了身体上的健康影响，如新病症的发作或现有病症的恶化。在最极端的情况下，悲伤与感知到的死亡风险增加有关。
本文通过诗歌来引起人们对悲伤对老年人健康和幸福感的强烈且往往持久的影响的关注，提供了对他们独特丧亲经历的情感、引人入胜和沉浸式的见解，从而挑战了悲伤有截止日期的观念。
