Practitioners who work with clients at the end of their lives face difficult decisions concerning the client's self-determination, the kind of death he or she will have, and the prolongation of life. They must also remain sensitive to the beliefs and needs of family members and the legal, ethical, and spiritual ramifications of the client's death. Featuring twenty-three decision cases based on interviews with professional social workers, this unique volume allows students to wrestle with the often incomplete and conflicting information, ethical issues, and time constraints of actual cases. Instead of offering easy solutions, this book provides detailed accounts that provoke stimulating debates among students, enabling them to confront their own responses, beliefs, and uncertainties to hone their critical thinking and decision making skills for professional practice. *Please note: Teaching Notes for this volume will be available from Electronic Hallway in Spring 2010. To access the Teaching Notes, you must first become a member of the Electronic Hallway. The main Electronic Hallway web page is at https://hallway.org/index.php. To join, click Become a Hallway Member in the Get Involved category or point your browser directly to https://hallway.org/involved/join.php and provide the required information. After your instructor status has been confirmed, you will receive an e-mail granting access to the Electronic Hallway. Once logged on to Electronic Hallway as a member, click Case Search in the Cases and Resources category on themain web page. Enter "death, dying, bereavement" (without the quotation marks) in the search box, select "all of the words" in the drop down menu, and click Submit. The search process will generate a list of Teaching Notes for cases from Dying, Death, and Bereavement in Social Work Practice: Decision Cases for Advanced Practice.

What role do man-eating monsters - vampires, zombies, werewolves and cannibals - play in contemporary culture? This book explores the question of whether recent representations of humans as food in popular culture characterizes a unique moment in Western cultural history and suggests a new set of attitudes toward people, monsters, animals, and death. This volume analyzes how previous epochs represented man-eating monsters and cannibalism. Cultural taboos across the world are explored and brought into perspective whilst we contemplate how the representations of humans as commodities can create a global atmosphere that creeps towards cannibalism as a norm. This book also explores the links between the role played by the animal rights movement in problematizing the difference between humans and nonhuman animals. Instead of looking at the relations between food, body, and culture, or the ways in which media images of food reach out to various constituencies and audiences, as some existing studies do, this collection is focused on the crucial question, of how and why popular culture representations diffuse the borders between monsters, people, and animals, and how this affects our ideas about what may and may not be eaten.

The family are intimately involved in the care of the dying and themselves require support through their experience of both palliative care and bereavement. This volume describes a comprehensive model of family care and how to go about it - an approach which is new, preventive, cost effective and with proven benefits to the bereaved.;The book has been designed rather like a therapy manual, providing a step-by-step approach to assessment and intervention. Its rich illustration through many clinical examples brings the process of therapy alive for the reader, anticipating the common challenges that arise and describing how the therapist might respond. Families are recognised throughout as a central social unit, pivotal to the success of palliative care. This title should be of use to doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, pastoral care workers, psychiatrists and other allied health professionals who work in caring for the dying and for their bereaved relatives. Based soundly on a decade of internationally regarded research, this book will alter the direction of future medical practice and is destined to become a classic in its field.

Wars in the industrial age kill large numbers of people. What do societies involved in these conflicts do with all the corpses? How do they show them respect? How do they dispose of them? What is their attitude to the bodies of the enemies? In the 19th century, those who died on the battlefield were pushed into mass graves, their identities unknown. Today, their remains are held in such high esteem that they are tracked down in order that last respects might be paid. As a historical account of the way in which war and death intersect, this book describes the complex attitude societies have towards death. Lured by the concept of eternal youth, tempted to deny death as well as physical decay, faced with longer life expectancy, we retain the hope of going off to war without loss of life. But does not our own expectation of zero death" imply "more deaths" for the other side?"

Suicide attacks have become the defining act of political violence of our age. From New York City to Baghdad, from Sri Lanka to Israel, few can doubt that they are a pervasive and terrifying feature of an increasing number of violent conflicts. Since 1981, approximately thirty organizations throughout the world - some of them secular and others affiliated to radical Islam - have carried out more than 500 suicide missions. Although a tiny fraction of the overall number of guerrilla and terrorist attacks occurring in the same period, the results have proved infinitely more lethal. This book is the first to shed real light on these extraordinary acts, and provide answers to the questions we all ask. Are these the actions of aggressive religious zealots and unbridled, irrational radicals or is there a logic driving those behind them? Are their motivations religious or has Islam provided a language to express essentially political causes? How can the perpetrators remain so lucidly effective in the face of certain death? And do these disparate attacks have something like a common cause? For more than two years, this team of internationally distinguished scholars has pursued an unprejudiced inquiry, investigating organizers and perpetrators alike of this extraordinary social phenomenon. Close comparisons between a whole range of cases raise challenging further questions: If suicide missions are so effective, why are they not more common? If killing is what matters, why not stick to 'ordinary' violent means? Or, if dying is what matters, why kill in the process? Making Sense of Suicide Missions contains a wealth of original information and cutting-edge analysis which furthers our understanding of this chilling feature of the contemporary world in radically new and unexpected ways.

"I wish I'd had this book when I needed it. Death and dying are not subjects that many people are comfortable talking about, but it's hugely important to be as prepared as you can be - emotionally, physically, practically, financially, and spiritually. This book may be the most important guide you could have." - Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat Pray Love ___________ The end of a life can often feel like a traumatic, chaotic and inhuman experience. In this reassuring and inspiring book, palliative care physician Dr BJ Miller and writer Shoshana Berger provide a vision for rethinking and navigating this universal process. There are plenty of self-help books for mourners, but nothing in the way of a modern, approachable and above all useful field guide for the living. And all of us - young, old, sick and well - could use the help. After all, pregnant couples have ample resources available to them as they prepare to bring a new life into the world: Lamaze courses, elaborate birth plans, tons of manuals. Why don't we have a What to Expect When You're Expecting to Die book? An accessible, beautifully designed and illustrated companion, A Beginner's Guide to the End offers a clear-eyed and compassionate survey of the most pressing issues that come up when one is dying, and will bring optimism and practical guidance to empower readers with the knowledge, resources and tools they'll need to die better, maybe even with triumph.

In this book, death, a topic often neglected by historians, is given the attention it deserves as one of the most important aspects of personal and societal experience. Facing the 'King of Terrors' examines changes in the roles and perceptions of death in one American community, Schenectady, New York, from 1750 to 1990. A remarkably thorough study, this work incorporates a wide variety of topics, including causes of death, epidemics and the reactions they engender, rituals surrounding dying and burial, cemeteries and grave markers, public celebrations of the deaths of important figures, reactions to war, and businesses that profit from death. Combining an in-depth look at patterns of death in society as a whole with an investigation of personal responses to such cultural customs, the book makes use of personal letters and diaries to explore how broader social changes were manifested in the lives of individuals.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. In rural China funerals are conducted locally, on village land by village elders. But in urban areas, people have neither land for burials nor elder relatives to conduct funerals. Chinese urbanization, which has increased drastically in recent decades, involves the creation of cemeteries, state-run funeral homes, and small private funerary businesses. The Funeral of Mr. Wang examines social change in urbanizing China through the lens of funerals, the funerary industry, and practices of memorialization. It analyzes changes in family life, patterns of urban sociality, transformations in economic relations, the politics of memorialization, and the echoes of these changes in beliefs about the dead and ghosts.

Before Drucilla Cornell's mother died, she asked her daughter to write a book, "that would bear witness to the dignity of her death" and that "her bridge class would be able to understand." Shortly thereafter, Cornell's mother, who had degenerative disease, decided to claim her right to die. Forceful, honest, and unsentimental, this is the book that Cornell promised to write. The fundamental argument of Between Women and Generations is that all women have dignity: we must ensure that they have the conditions under which they can claim that dignity in their own lives; even if they are physically harmed or morally wronged, their dignity cannot be lost. Cornell uses the personal as a springboard to discuss contemporary issues concerning women today. She engages with the difficult nature of intergenerational relationships between women by writing about her relationship to her own mother. In telling the story of her adoption of Sarita Graciela Kellow Cornell, her Paraguayan daughter, and of her relationship with UNITY, a cooperative of house cleaners in Long island, New York, Cornelll creates a powerful picture of the legacies of dignity between women and generations.

Winner of the 2020 Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing Nearly 1,600 Americans are still unaccounted for and presumed dead from the Vietnam War. These are the stories of those who mourn and continue to search for them. For many families the Vietnam War remains unsettled. Nearly 1,600 Americans-and more than 300,000 Vietnamese-involved in the conflict are still unaccounted for. In What Remains, Sarah E. Wagner tells the stories of America's missing service members and the families and communities that continue to search for them. From the scientists who work to identify the dead using bits of bone unearthed in Vietnamese jungles to the relatives who press government officials to find the remains of their loved ones, Wagner introduces us to the men and women who seek to bring the missing back home. Through their experiences she examines the ongoing toll of America's most fraught war. Every generation has known the uncertainties of war. Collective memorials, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery, testify to the many service members who never return, their fates still unresolved. But advances in forensic science have provided new and powerful tools to identify the remains of the missing, often from the merest trace-a tooth or other fragment. These new techniques have enabled military experts to recover, repatriate, identify, and return the remains of lost service members. So promising are these scientific developments that they have raised the expectations of military families hoping to locate their missing. As Wagner shows, the possibility of such homecomings compels Americans to wrestle anew with their memories, as with the weight of their loved ones' sacrifices, and to reevaluate what it means to wage war and die on behalf of the nation.

This book investigates the language created and used on social media to express and respond to personal experiences of illness, dying and mourning. The authors begin by setting out the established and recent research on social and existential media, affect and language, before focusing on Facebook groups dealing with the illness and death of two Danish children. Through these in-depth case studies, they produce insights into different ways of engaging in affective processes related to illness and death on social media, and into both the ritualized and innovative vernacular vocabulary created through these encounters. Developing an analytical framework for understanding the social role and logics of "affective language" (such as emojis, interjections and other forms of expressive interactive writing), The Language of Illness and Death on Social Media will be of great interest to all those striving to understand the affective importance and roles of language for sharing experiences of illness, death and commemoration in these spheres.

Over a decade ago the field of bioethics was established in response to the increased control over the design of living organisms afforded by both medical genetics and biotechnology. Since its introduction, bioethics has become established as an academic discipline with journals and professional societies, is covered regularly in the media, and affects people everyday around the globe. In response to the increasing need for information about medical genetics and biotechnology as well as the ethical issues these fields raise, Sheed & Ward proudly presents the Readings in Bioethics Series. Edited by Thomas A. Shannon, the series provides anthologies of critical essays and reflections by leading ethicists in four pivotal areas: reproductive technologies, genetic technologies, death and dying, and health care policy. The goal of this series is twofold: first, to provide a set of readers on thematic topics for introductory or survey courses in bioethics or for courses with a particular theme or time limitation. Second, each of the readers in this series is designed to help students focus more thoroughly and effectively on specific topics that flesh out the ethical issues at the core of bioethics. The series is also highly accessible to general readers interested in bioethics. This volume collects critical essays by leading scholars on the definition of death, consciousness, quality of life, tube feeding, pallative care, physician-assisted suicide and the debate on euthanasia. Included in this volume are works by Paul B. Bascom, David DeGrazia, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, Kathleen Foley, Herbert Hendin, Michael Panicola, Stephen G. Post, Thomas A. Shannon, Charles F. von Gunten, Susan W. Tolle.

In this fascinating new book, Vincent Henry (a 21-year veteran of the NYPD who recently retired to become a university professor) explores the psychological transformations and adaptations that result from police officers' encounters with death. Police can encounter death frequently in the course of their duties, and these encounters may range from casual contacts with the deaths of others to the most profound and personally consequential confrontations with their own mortality. Using the 'survivor psychology' model as its theoretical base, this insightful and provocative research ventures into a previously unexplored area of police psychology to illuminate and explore the new modes of adaptation, thought, and feeling that result from various types of death encounters in police work.
The psychology of survival asserts that the psychological world of the survivor--one who has come in close physical or psychic contact with death but nevertheless managed to live--is characterized by five themes: psychic numbing, death guilt, the death imprint, suspicion of counterfeit nurturance, and the struggle to make meaning. These themes become manifest in the survivor's behavior, permeating his or her lifestyle and worldview.
Drawing on extensive interviews with police officers in five nominal categories--rookie officers, patrol sergeants, crime scene technicians, homicide detectives, and officers who survived a mortal combat situation in which an assailant or another officer died--Henry identifies the impact such death encounters have upon the individual, the police organization, and the occupational culture of policing. He has produced a comprehensive and highly textured interpretation ofpolice psychology and police behavior, bolstered by the unique insights that come from his personal experience as an officer, his intimate familiarity with the subtleties and nuances of the police culture's value and belief systems, and his meticulous research and rigorous method. Death Work provides a unique prism through which to view the individual, organizational, and social dynamics of contemporary urban policing. With a foreword by Robert Jay Lifton and a chapter devoted to the local police response to the World Trade Center attacks, Death Work will be of interest to psychologists and criminal justice experts, as well as police officers eager to gain insight into their unique relationship to death.

"I tremble to say there's good in death, because I've looked in the eyes of the grieving mother and I've seen the heartbreak of the stricken widow, but I've also seen something more in death, something good. Death's hands aren't all bony and cold."-from Confessions of a Funeral Director We are a people who deeply fear death. While humans are biologically wired to evade death for as long as possible, we have become too adept at hiding from it, vilifying it, and-when it can be avoided no longer-letting the professionals take over. Sixth-generation funeral director Caleb Wilde understands this reticence and fear. He had planned to get as far away from the family business as possible. He wanted to make a difference in the world, and how could he do that if all the people he worked with were . . . dead? Slowly, he discovered that caring for the deceased and their loved ones was making a difference-in other people's lives to be sure, but it also seemed to be saving his own. A spirituality of death began to emerge as he observed: * The family who lovingly dressed their deceased father for his burial * The act of embalming a little girl that offered a gift back to her grieving family * The nursing home that honored a woman's life by standing in procession as her body was taken away * The funeral that united a conflicted community Through stories like these, told with equal parts humor and poignancy, Wilde offers an intimate look into the business and a new perspective on living and dying.

"Things You Can do When You're Dead!" by Tricia Robertson is the long awaited book from one of Scotland's foremost psychical researchers. In this book the author shares some of her thirty-year research into mediumship, reincarnation, psychic healing, apparitions, poltergeists, and after death communications. Tricia's refreshing no-nonsense approach to the subject makes for compelling reading and should interest skeptics, believers, and anyone who wants to know what you can do when you're dead!

Though considered by devotees to be perhaps the most potent expression of religious faith, dying for one's God is also one of the most difficult concepts for modern observers of religion to understand. This is especially true in the West, where martyrdom has all but disapeared and martyrs in other cultures are often viewed skeptically and dismissed as fanatics. This book seeks to foster a greater understanding of these acts of religious devotion by explaining how martyrdom has historically been viewed in the world's major religions. It provides the first sustained, cross-cultural examination of this fascinating aspect of religious life. Spanning 4000 years of history and ranging from Saul in the Hebrew Bible to Sati immolations in present-day India, this book provides a wealth of insight into an often noted but rarely understood cultural phenomenon.

Dying is a serious and complicated business. Circumstances surrounding the sudden death of the author's husband inspired her to recruit professionals and create a 258-page workbook to use as a guided tour for end-of-life planning and transitioning after the loss of a loved one. It is an all-in-one-place to map out wishes and list legal and financial affairs. The comprehensive step-by-step checklists and fill-in-the-blanks worksheets that are in an easy-to-use format, will help guide you through making decisions, expressing your wishes, encourage conversation, eliminate confusion, ease the transition, and help protect your survivors from injustices and victimization that often occurs upon the death of a loved one. Charlotte invites you to hold her hand as she navigates you through this process.

Death, a topic often neglected by historians, is in this book given the attention it deserves as one of the most important aspects of personal and societal experience. Facing the "King of Terrors" examines changes in the roles and perceptions of death in one American community, Schenectady, New York, from 1750 to 1990. It combines an in-depth look at patterns of death in society as a whole with an investigation of personal responses to such cultural customs.

The Labour of Loss explores how mothers, fathers, widows, relatives and friends dealt with their experiences of grief and loss during and after the First and Second World Wars. Based on an examination of private loss through letters and diaries, this study makes a significant contribution to understanding how people came to terms with the deaths of friends and family. Unlike other studies in this area, The Labour of Loss considers how mourning affected men and women in different ways, and analyzes the gendered dimensions of grief.

The first book length anthropological study of voluntary assisted dying in Switzerland, Leaving is a narrative account of five people who ended their lives with assistance. Stavrianakis places his observations of the judgment to end life in this way within a larger inquiry about how to approach and understand the practice of assisted suicide, which he characterizes as operating in a political, legal, and medical "parazone," adjacent to medical care and expertise. Frequently, observers too rapidly integrate assisted suicide into moral positions that reflect sociological and psychological commonplaces about individual choice and its social determinants. Leaving engages with core early twentieth-century psychoanalytic and sociological texts arguing for a contemporary approach to the phenomenon of voluntary death, seeking to learn from such conceptual repertoires, as well as to acknowledge their limits. Leaving concludes on the anthropological question of how to account for the ethics of assistance with suicide: to grasp the actuality and composition of the ethical work that goes on in the configuration of a subject, one who is making a judgment about dying, with other participants and observers, the anthropologist included.

Suicide is the third major killer of young people in the Western world, and in the closing decades of the twentieth century it reached epidemic proportions: around the world there has been a frightening surge in suicides committed by children, adolescents and young adults. Kay Redfield Jamison is herself a survivor of a nearly lethal suicide attempt which came after years of battling manic depression. Her survival marked the beginning of a life's work to investigate mental illness and self-inflicted death, and she is now an internationally recognized authority on the depressive illnesses. In Night Falls Fast Dr. Jamison dispels the silence and shame that surround the subject of suicide and provides a better understanding of the suicidal mind and a chance to recognize the person at risk. She brings to the book not only wide scientific knowledge and clinical experience but also great compassion. In tracing the network of reasons underlying the phenomenon, she gives us astonishing examples and a startling look at the journals, drawings and farewell notes of people who have chosen to kill themselves. She also provides vivid insight into the most recent findings from hospitals and laboratories across the world; the critical biological and psychological factors that interact to cause suicide; and the new strategies being evolved to combat them. Night Falls Fast is a sensitive and penetrating analysis that helps us to comprehend the profound and disturbing sense of loss created in those left behind. It is the first major book on the subject in a quarter of a century and stands to become a classic account of one of the most devastating and destructive causes of death of our time.

"A compulsively readable, totally unforgettable memoir that recounts a sensitive college student's experience working on an emergency ambulance in hell, aka New York City." -- James Patterson In 1967, Mike Scardino was an eighteen year-old pre-med student with a problem - his parents couldn't afford to pay his college tuition. Luckily, Mike's dad hooked him up with a lucrative, albeit unusual, summer job, one he's never forgotten. Bad Call is Mike's visceral, fast-moving, and mordantly funny account of the summers he spent working as an "ambulance attendant" on the mean streets of late 1960s New York, at a time when emergency medicine looked nothing like it does today. Fueled by adrenaline and Sabrett's hot dogs, he crossed third rails to pick up injured trainmen, encountered a woman attacked by rats, attended to victims of a plane crash at JFK airport, was nearly murdered, and got an early and indelible education in the impermanence of life. But his work also afforded moments of rare beauty, hope, and everyday heroism, and it changed the course of Mike's life as well as the way he saw the world. Action-packed, poignant, and rich with details that bring Mike's world to life, Bad Call is a gritty portrait of a bygone era as well as a thrilling tale of one man's coming of age.