State the problem
What is the important of the problem?
Is professional help necessary for people dealing with bereavement? The professional help referred to in these questions is grief counseling. In a study concerning adaptation after bereavement, Louis A. Gamino, Swell, Hogan and Mason collected data from 69 adults. The adults were at least 18 years old and to qualify for the study needed to be grieving the death of someone significant to them who had passed away 12-36 months before the study. The reason behind the waiting 12 months was to avoid interviewing people with acute grief, and not going past 36 months so memories were still valid and fresh. The causes of death ranged from illness, accidents, suicides, homicides and …show more content…
John R. Jordan and Roberta A. Neimeyer examined if grief counseling works and their conclusions based on previous studies, showed the efficacy of traditional counseling for the bereaved is profoundly low. In their article Does Grief Counseling Work? the authors suggest recommendations for future research and practices for bereavement care. In their study, they conclude from previous research studies that grief counseling isn’t needed for the majority of mourners, grief counseling does not work efficiently in the formal intervention way, and “the positive effects of grief counseling may be masked by methodological issues in the design and implementation of the studies (Jordan & Neimeyer …show more content…
Moving away from the generic population dealing with mourning to focusing on high-risk mourners, such as bereaved mothers, suicide survivors, etc, will show their increasing levels of distress and demonstrate how intervention is beneficial for them. They are also calling for “more sophisticated research designs.” They suggested the redesign to be more “efficacy-focused” and “effectiveness-oriented” because there is a lot more to be learned from studying the effectiveness of grief counseling in a clinical setting, and there is a variety of intervention styles, leadership formats, and various structures that could be studied for effectiveness. The authors want to urge practitioners to recognize grief counseling is helpful for everyone, and some people do better without counseling. It is not a safe assumption that grief counseling is beneficial or a natural part of the healing process. However, practitioners should focus their efforts on engaging high risk