Sarah Wayland is an Australian social worker and health researcher. [1] Her research focuses on the areas of missing persons, ambiguous loss, grief and suicide bereavement. [2] [3] [4] She is Associate Professor in the School of Health at the University of New England and a Senior Research Fellow for Manna Institute. [5]
Wayland worked as a social worker from 1998-2010 in the fields of child protection and victims of crime. [3] In 2005, she received a Churchill Fellowship to study "the international approach to counselling for families of missing persons focusing on the concept of unresolved loss". [6]
She obtained her PhD from the University of New England in 2015, studying hope and ambiguous loss, and was awarded the Chancellors Medal for Doctoral Research. [3] [7]
In 2019, she collaborated with the Australian Federal Police National Missing Persons Coordination Centre to publish "Acknowledging the Empty Space", a resource for those supporting people whose loved one is missing. [8]
She is a regular contributor to The Conversation, ABC News and Radio, and SBS. [1] [2] [9] [10] [11]
Sarah Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough, Princess of Mindelheim, Countess of Nellenburg, was an English courtier who rose to be one of the most influential women of her time through her close relationship with Anne, Queen of Great Britain. The Duchess of Marlborough's relationship and influence with Anne were widely known, and leading public figures often turned their attentions to her, hoping for favour from Anne.
Grief is the response to the loss of something deemed important, particularly to the loss of someone or some living thing that has died, to which a bond or affection was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, grief also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, cultural, spiritual and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, while grief is the reaction to that loss.
According to the model of the five stages of grief, or the Kübler-Ross model, those experiencing grief go through five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Although it is in common use, studies have not confirmed these stages, and the model has been criticized as outdated as well as unhelpful in explaining the grieving process.
Disenfranchised grief is a term coined by Dr. Kenneth J. Doka in 1989. This concept describes the fact that some forms of grief are not acknowledged on a personal or societal level in modern day Eurocentric culture. For example, those around you may not view your loss as a significant loss, and they may think you don’t have the right to grieve. They might not like how you may or may not be expressing your grief, and thus they may feel uncomfortable, or judgmental. This is not a conscious way of thinking for most individuals, as it is deeply engrained in our psyche. This can be extremely isolating, and push you to question the depth of your grief and the loss you’ve experienced. This concept is viewed as a ”type of grief”, but it more so can be viewed as a "side effect" of grief. This also is not only applicable to grief in the case of death, but also the many other forms of grief. There are few support systems, rituals, traditions, or institutions such as bereavement leave available to those experiencing grief and loss.
Death is dealt with differently in cultures around the world, and there are ethical issues relating to death, such as martyrdom, suicide and euthanasia. Death refers to the permanent termination of life-sustaining processes in an organism, i.e. when all biological systems of a human being cease to operate. Death and its spiritual ramifications are debated in every manner all over the world. Most civilizations dispose of their dead with rituals developed through spiritual traditions.
Sarah Coral Hanson-Young is an Australian politician who has been a Senator for South Australia since July 2008, representing the Australian Greens. She is the youngest woman to be elected to federal parliament, winning election at the age of 25 and taking office at the age of 26. She was the youngest person ever elected to the Senate, until Jordon Steele-John was elected in 2017.
Grief counseling is a form of psychotherapy that aims to help people cope with the physical, emotional, social, spiritual, and cognitive responses to loss. These experiences are commonly thought to be brought on by a loved person's death, but may more broadly be understood as shaped by any significant life-altering loss.
Youth suicide is when a young person, generally categorized as someone below the legal age of majority, deliberately ends their own life. Rates of youth suicide and attempted youth suicide in Western societies and other countries are high. Youth suicide attempts are more common among girls, but adolescent males are the ones who usually carry out suicide. Suicide rates in youths have nearly tripled between the 1960s and 1980s. For example, in Australia suicide is second only to motor vehicle accidents as its leading cause of death for people aged 15 to 25.
Michelle L. Rusk, born Michelle Linn, and formerly known as Michelle Linn-Gust, is an American author and speaker on coping with grief following suicide, especially that of siblings. She is a Past President of the American Association of Suicidology and she has written several books about the experiences of families following the suicide of a member, given workshops to the bereaved and the clinicians who work with them on dealing with their grief, and spoken widely on the topic. She also has offered workshops in the Southwest for the Navajo and Pueblo peoples of the reservations, who have suffered high rates of suicide among young people. From 2012 to 2015 she wrote the Good Causes column for the Naperville Sun newspaper and today is working to inspire hope and healing in people who have suffered loss, particularly divorced women.
Prolonged grief disorder (PGD), also known as complicated grief (CG), traumatic grief (TG) and persistent complex bereavement disorder (PCBD) in the DSM-5, is a mental disorder consisting of a distinct set of symptoms following the death of a family member or close friend. People with PGD are preoccupied by grief and feelings of loss to the point of clinically significant distress and impairment, which can manifest in a variety of symptoms including depression, emotional pain, emotional numbness, loneliness, identity disturbance and difficulty in managing interpersonal relationships. Difficulty accepting the loss is also common, which can present as rumination about the death, a strong desire for reunion with the departed, or disbelief that the death occurred. PGD is estimated to be experienced by about 10 percent of bereaved survivors, although rates vary substantially depending on populations sampled and definitions used.
Ambiguous loss is a loss that occurs without a significant likelihood of reaching emotional closure or a clear understanding. This kind of loss leaves a person searching for answers, and thus complicates and delays the process of grieving, and often results in unresolved grief. Some examples are infertility, termination of pregnancy, disappearance of a family member, death of an ex-spouse, and a family member being physically alive but in a state of cognitive decline due to Alzheimer's disease or dementia. An ambiguous loss can be categorized into two types of loss: physical or psychological. Physical loss and psychological loss differ in terms of what is being grieved for, the loss of the physical body, or the psychological mind. Experiencing an ambiguous loss can lead to personal questions, such as, "Am I still married to my missing spouse?," or "Am I still a child to a parent who no longer remembers me?". Since the grief process in an ambiguous loss is halted, it is harder to cope or move on to acceptance from the type of loss experienced. There are various types of grief that can occur due to the type of ambiguity experienced and corresponding therapy techniques to address the certain types of grief. The overall goal of therapy to cope with ambiguous loss is to overcome the trauma associated with it and restore resilience.
Naomi Ruth Wray PhD is an Australian statistical geneticist at the University of Queensland, where she is a Professorial Research Fellow at the Institute for Molecular Bioscience and an Affiliate Professor in the Queensland Brain Institute. She is also a National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) Principal Research Fellow and, along with Peter Visscher and Jian Yang, is one of the three executive team members of the NHMRC-funded Program in Complex Trait Genomics. She is also the Michael Days Chair of Psychiatric Genetics at Oxford University. Naomi pioneered the use of polygenic scores in human genetics, and has made significant contributions to both the development of methods and their clinical use.
Théo Hayez was an 18-year-old Belgian man who disappeared in the Cape Byron area. He was last sighted leaving Cheeky Monkey's bar in Byron Bay at approximately 11:00 pm on 31 May 2019.
Suicide bereavement is the experience of those who are grieving the loss of someone to suicide. Over 800,000 individuals die by suicide every year. It was stated by Shneidman (1978) that every suicide leaves behind 6 "survivor-victims". However, new research shows that each suicide leaves behind approximately 135 who personally knew the decedent. The #not6 hashtag has been used by Cerel and colleagues to represent that suicide bereavement is many more than publicly portrayed.
Marion Barter was an Australian missing person, teacher and mother-of-two, who disappeared on Sunday 22 June 1997 from Southport, Queensland. She was dropped off at a bus station in Surfers Paradise, Queensland to go to the airport for a planned, long-term vacation in England. She has not been seen since.
Camille B. Wortman is a clinical health psychologist and expert on grief and coping in response to traumatic events and loss. She is an Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Stony Brook University.
Claire Bidwell Smith is an American therapist and author who specializes in grief. She is known for her memoir, The Rules of Inheritance, as well as her books After This: When Life is Over, Where Do We Go? and Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. Smith draws on the personal loss of both of her parents and on her profession as a grief counselor to help others navigate grief and healing.
Reproductive loss, sometimes reproductive grief, describes a potential emotional response to unsuccessful attempts at human reproduction or family-building. These experienced losses may include involuntary childlessness generally, pregnancy loss from all causes, perinatal death, stillbirth, infecundity and infertility from all causes, failed attempts to conceive, failed fertility treatments, failed gestational surrogacy procedures, and losses related to all dimensions of the adoption process. Responses to miscarriage, stillbirth, selective reduction and neonatal death are a subtype of reproductive loss called perinatal bereavement.
Julie Cerel is a clinical psychologist known for her contributions to the field of suicidology, including suicide exposure, prevention and bereavement. She currently serves as a Professor in the College of Social Work at the University of Kentucky, where she holds the Wilson Professorship of Mental Health. Cerel is also the director of the Suicide Prevention & Exposure Lab (SPEL) at the University of Kentucky.