Ambivalent trust and ontological representations of death as latent factors of religiosity

Strengths and Weaknesses of Children Witnessing Relatives with Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis

Research on minors who have a close family member with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) is scarce. This study aims to analyze the relationships between reflective function and wellbeing among such children, considering their reflective function, representations of death, and behavioral problems with the following instruments: Reflective Functioning Questionnaire, Testoni Death Representation Scale for Children, Positive and Negative Affect Schedule for Children, and Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire. Participants were 248 minors divided into the target group (38 children-16 females, 22 males-7-18 years old (M = 11.61, SD = 2.97)) and the control group (210 students-120 females, 90 males 9-14 years old (M = 11.17, SD = 1.33)). Results showed that the target group exhibited more negative affect and hyperactivity. However, they also showed less uncertainty in their mental states. The opportunity to support these minors is discussed.

Reconstructing Social Relationships in a Post-Lockdown Suburban Area of Southern Italy Using Pastoral Counselling

The growing interest in spirituality has enabled numerous avenues of pastoral counselling support, which can be a useful resource for improving quality of life in the context of significant social deprivation. The aim of this research was to investigate the role of the spiritual dimension of pastoral support interventions created to help the inhabitants of a strongly deprived territory in Southern Italy during the COVID-19 pandemic. Eight people between the ages of 28 and 67 took part in the study. A qualitative research design was applied via online interviews with the participants, who were operators of a pastoral counselling service located on the outskirts of a suburban town. The main emergent themes were the importance of religiosity and spirituality in the lives of the participants, the role that these two aspects play in the lives of those who carry out activities devoted to helping others, and the ways in which these dimensions are used within support programmes responding to the needs of an area characterized by socioeconomic and psychosocial problems. The interviews revealed how pastoral counselling can be useful in situations of stress in highly deprived areas.

Spirituality for Coping with the Trauma of a Loved One's Death During the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Italian Qualitative Study

Spirituality may be a key factor in reducing the negative psychological effects of traumatic events and a means by which the experience of grief can be processed. The objective of the present research is to assess whether and how spirituality provided concrete support in those who lost a loved one during the COVID-19 pandemic. The participants are 8 people from the most affected cities in northern Italy. They were interviewed in depth, the interviews were transcribed and the texts were analyzed through Interpretive Phenomenological Analysis. The results show that spirituality has been found to be a protective factor with regard to the processing of grief in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic, in particular with regard to the belief that the deceased loved one is now in an otherworldly dimension. In addition, the celebration of a funeral rite offers support to the grieving person in the early stages of mourning thus laying the foundation for a healthy grieving process. It is therefore important to support individual spirituality, which can be a useful tool for processing the traumatic experience, especially in difficult times such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Spiritual Counseling During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Italy: a Qualitative Study

The COVID-19 pandemic has created profound upheavals in today's society, accompanied by psychological effects. The discomfort experienced during the pandemic accompanied by the increased availability of time has offered many people the chance to reconnect with their spiritual dimension, which is considered a vital resource in managing the stress produced by the perception of risk to their health. This study addresses the motivations that led research participants to choose to receive spiritual support via a 10-week training. The work also explores the changes perceived by the participants as they overcame the difficulties resulting from the pandemic. The research involved nine people between the ages of 19 and 59 who took part in an online experience focused on the spiritual dimension. Almost all the participants came from an area in Northern Italy most affected by the pandemic. A qualitative research design was used, with semistructured interviews designed to understand participants' views on the topic under investigation. The areas that emerged from the interviews concerned the motivations that led the participants to choose a spiritual support process, the role of spirituality in daily life, and the changes participants experienced after the conclusion of the experience related to managing the stress caused by the pandemic. In agreement with the existing literature, the results show that spiritual support can be useful in counteracting the negative effects of the pandemic, producing improvements in the quality of life.

Health Education as a Means of Addressing Death in the Elderly

Education for death is an emerging field of study in which health education research and proposals are increasingly being made with the aim of acquiring knowledge and skills to promote positive attitudes towards health and preparation for the end of life. The aim of this study is to find out what experience older people have had with death education and the importance they give to health education. A qualitative methodological design was selected using a semi-structured interview. The survey consisted of interviews with 28 participants from the city of Granada (Spain) aged 61 to 78. This qualitative-descriptive study is based on an analysis of older people's experience of education and preparation for death throughout their lives. The results show that, in most cases, the only information received was in childhood and always from a religious perspective. Death and health are closely related, so working on death education helps to improve the quality of life of elderly people. Health education offers ways of coping with the end of life through the transmission of values and practices that make it possible to anticipate and resolve situations of instability or anxiety. Facing death naturally and as just another part of life will help to make healthy ageing possible, through educational proposals related to the integral health of elderly people.

The hospice as a learning space: a death education intervention with a group of adolescents

Background

The denial of death in Western society deprives young people of the tools to derive meaning from experiences of death and dying. Literature shows that death education may allow them to become familiar with this topic without causing negative effects. This article describes the effects of a death education course with adolescents, wherein participants were given the opportunity to meet palliative doctors and palliative psychologists at school and in a hospice, where they were able to converse with the families of the dying.

Methods

This study used mixed methods and included an evaluation of a death education intervention with longitudinal follow-up of outcomes. The course involved 87 secondary school students (experimental group) aged between 16 and 20 years. We also recruited a control group of 76 similarly-aged students to observe differences. The variables we examined were: alexithymia, representation of death, value attributed to life and spirituality. These were measured with the following instruments: the Toronto Alexithymia Scale-20, the Testoni Death Representation Scale, the Personal Meaning Profile and the Spiritual Orientation Inventory, respectively. To better understand how the students perceived the experience, we asked the experimental group to answer some open-ended questions. Their answers were analysed through thematic analysis.

Results

The study showed that death education and the hospice experience did not produce negative effects, but rather allowed students to decrease alexithymia, improving their ability to recognise and express emotions. Thematic analysis revealed that all participants perceived the experience as very positive.

Conclusions

Our findings affirm that death education programs can be successfully implemented in high schools, and that they can usefully involve local hospices and palliative care professionals, especially physicians and psychologists.

Supplementary Information

The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12904-021-00747-w.

Mourning and Management of the COVID-19 Health Emergency in the Priestly Community: Qualitative Research in a Region of Northern Italy Severely Affected by the Pandemic

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic is causing major social changes to which significant psychological effects are linked. During the first phase of the pandemic wave in Italy, whilst there was insufficient information about the phenomenon and the strategies to safeguard the population against it, many categories of people, whose professions required constant contact with the public, were affected by the contagion. Aims: The literature has shown how religiousness can support the management of stress due to diseases and health risks. In relation to this, the current study wanted to investigate how priests managed the early stages of the pandemic. This work, therefore, aimed to investigate the psychological experiences related to the contagion and the eventual death of colleagues as well as the resilience strategies activated by the priests during the process. Participants: The research involved 12 Catholic priests, all male and aged between 42 and 63 years. They came from the same pastoral community in one of the regions in Northern Italy that were most affected during the first phase of the pandemic. Those ministers had been constantly in contact with the faithful of their parishes since the breakout of the virus. Methodology: A qualitative research design was adopted, and in-depth interviews were conducted. The dialogues aimed at investigating the deep, personal and relational experiences of the priests, together with their concerns and the tools they adopted to manage anxiety. The texts obtained from the interviews were subjected to thematic analysis. Results: The areas studied concerned the experiences of the participants during the lockdown, the implications of social distancing and lack of funeral rituality and, finally, the importance of prayer as a resilience factor. Conclusions: In the current scenario dominated by the pandemic, it is significant and stimulating to understand and reflect on the functions and roles of the experiences of faith, particularly the act of elaborating the process of mourning due to COVID-19.

The Hospice as a Learning Environment: A Follow-Up Study with a Palliative Care Team

In Western society, the topic of death has been removed from everyday life and replaced with medical language. Such censorship does not reduce individuals’ fear of death, but rather limits their ability to elaborate their experiences of death, thus generating negative effects. The objective of this follow-up qualitative study was to detect how and if death education can help to improve individuals’ relationship with death and enhance care environments like hospices. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with palliative care professionals and teachers who had taken part in a death education initiative three years earlier. The results confirmed the initiative’s positive effect on both palliative care professionals and teachers. The participants reported that the education initiative helped them to positively modify their perspective on death, end-of-life care, and their own relationship to life, as well as their perception of community attitudes towards the hospice, which seemed to become less discriminatory. This study confirmed that school education initiatives can usefully create continuity between hospices and local communities. This project provided an educational space wherein it was possible for participants to elaborate their experiences in relation to death and to re-evaluate and appreciate hospices.

The effect of death education on fear of death amongst Italian adolescents: A nonrandomized controlled study

This study describes the psychological effects of death education in reducing the fear of death in a large cohort of Italian adolescents. Following the constructs of "distal defenses" and "mortality salience" of Terror Management Theory, this research intervention also evaluated the proposition that spirituality and belief in an afterlife could provide an effective buffer against fear of death. Five hundred thirty-four Italian high school students participated in a school-based death education program with an experimental group and a nonrandomized control condition. Using a pre/post-course design, we assessed fear of death, alexithymia, and representations of death and spirituality for both groups. Results confirmed that the course reduced death fears and the representation of death as annihilation while also enhancing spirituality. In particular, the older participants in the death education course increased their spirituality and decreased their fear of death, whereas females reduced their conviction that death was an absolute annihilation. Finally, the structural model suggested that alexithymia mediates the relationships among fear of death and spirituality; in particular, fear of death predicted more alexithymia and more alexithymia predicted lower spirituality.

Solastalgia's mourning and the slowly evolving effect of asbestos pollution: A qualitative study in Italy

In Italy, the problem of asbestos pollution is increasing in severity. In fact, in recent years, the number of people affected by asbestos-related illnesses has been growing because of the fibre's slowly evolving effects and its progressive pollution in the environment adjacent to the places where it is processed. Even though the physical consequences of asbestos are now quite clear, few studies have examined the psychological consequences of this kind of disaster. Since it is difficult to perceive its pathogenicity in daily life, this study was conducted in the affected areas of north-eastern Italy, using the qualitative research in psychology with 51 persons who experienced asbestos-related illnesses (19 sick persons and 37 relatives of sick persons). Their narratives described being rooted in a space contaminated by an invisible enemy. In particular, attention was paid to the consequent solastalgia, a kind of mourning arising from loss of place attachment. Results of the qualitative analysis revealed how the different phases of the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross DABDA (Denial Anger Bargaining Depression Acceptance) model of coping with death constitute such feelings, whereas the dual-process model of Stroebe and Schut emphasised how these people seem to be loss oriented because of their perceived lack of community restoration. A discussion of the relationships between attribution of responsibility, entirely external and mostly inscribed in the DABDA categories of ‛anger’ and ‛acceptance’, is presented, with further considerations about mourning and the need to improve specific psychological support in this field of environmental disaster.