{"id":6672,"date":"2019-06-24T14:40:56","date_gmt":"2019-06-24T14:40:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6672"},"modified":"2019-06-24T14:40:57","modified_gmt":"2019-06-24T14:40:57","slug":"elizabeth-kubler-ross","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/?p=6672","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Kubler-Ross"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross\/Elizabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Like birth, dying is a topic we prefer not to think about. No amount of\nhelpful comment on the theme of \u2018We\u2019ve all got to go one day\u2019 helps us prepare\nfor our personal departure from our particular stage. I want to salute one of\nthe women of the 20th<\/sup> century who single-handedly did so much to\nhelp our understanding of the processes around death and dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross was born in Switzerland in 1926, one of triplets. At\nthe end of the Second World War she volunteered at the International Voluntary\nService for Peace, working with concentration camp victims in Poland and\nGermany. She studied medicine and qualified as a doctor in Switzerland, moving\nto the US in 1958 with her American husband.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She specialised in psychiatry, and she observed that in general, health\nprofessionals, who had been trained to heal and treat disease, avoided\nterminally ill patients and did not know how to help them prepare for death.\nShe resolved to change attitudes and practice, and this became the focus of her\nlife\u2019s work. She started seminars for medical students to give them a greater\nunderstanding of their end-of-life patients, thus becoming a pioneer of the\nconcept of providing psychological help to the dying.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She published her seminal work, On Death and Dying<\/em>, in 1969, and it\nis here that she introduced the concept of there being five stages of grief as\npart of adjusting to the process of dying. They are: denial, anger, bargaining,\ndepression and acceptance.   In general, people experience these\ndifferent emotions when faced with impending death, although the order and\nsequence can vary with the individual person. The book quickly became a\nstandard text for professionals working with the terminally ill. Today, these\nfive stages are as much a part of the understanding of the process of dying\namongst doctors and therapists as Maslow\u2019s Hierarchy of Needs is intrinsic to\nan understanding of human motivation. As Kubler-Ross developed her theories, it\nbecame clear that the five stages were equally relevant to people coping with\nthe death of a loved one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She taught courses on death and dying in colleges, medical schools,\nhospitals and social work institutions. Her work coincided with Dame Cicely\nSaunders\u2019s development of the hospice movement in the UK, and helped pave the\nway for hospices to be established in the US.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In later life Kubler-Ross became convinced of the existence of an afterlife,\nand she studied people\u2019s descriptions of their apparent near-death experiences.\nShe became increasingly attracted to New Age spirituality, and established a\nhealing centre in California, where she continued to develop her ideas based on\nthe afterlife.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was the recipient of twenty honorary degrees and in 2007 was an inductee\nin the Women\u2019s Hall of Fame. There are many remarkable quotes attributed to\nher, and for me the following is particularly resonant, and a useful reminder\nof what, in a way, life is all about:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of\nour physical lives on this earth.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elizabeth Kubler-Ross – a most worthy candidate for damehood.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Dying is something we human beings do continuously, not just at the end of our physical lives on this earth.\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":3727,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,69,132,55,159],"tags":[76,94,133,97,160],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6672"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6677,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6672\/revisions\/6677"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3727"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6672"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6672"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damesnet.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6672"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}