How to Take Care of Yourself During the Grieving Process

While your wellbeing might be the furthest thing from your mind when you’re grieving, it’s more important than ever to take care of yourself during this time. Not only does bereavement do a number on your emotional health, but it can present you with physical problems, such as the physical implications of stress and a lack of energy. This is why looking after your physical and emotional needs will help you get through this difficult time, so how can you help yourself through it?

 

1. Don’t hide or suppress your feelings: Grief is a powerful experience; so powerful, in fact, that you can be terrified of letting it out, in case it overwhelms you. You can try to suppress your grief but, unfortunately, you can’t avoid it forever. In order to heal and move forward with your life, you have to face your feelings and acknowledge the pain. By trying to avoid the feelings of sadness and loss, you are really only prolonging the grieving process. Plus, if you let that grief go unresolved, you could be putting your wellness at risk of major complications such as depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and health problems.

 

2. Get creative and practical with your feelings: One way to prevent the suppression of your grief – but not let the emotions overpower you – is to express your feelings in a tangible or creative way. Some people find it helpful to write about their loss in a journal, as this enables you to clarify and get a grip on that myriad of feelings. If you’ve lost someone you love, you might feel the benefit of writing a letter to that person, so you can say the things you never got to say. You might like to make a scrapbook or photo album celebrating the person’s life or get involved in a cause or organisation that was important to them so you can carry on their legacy.

 

3. Take care of your physical wellbeing: There is a strong connection between the body and the mind, and so feeling good on a physical level will help you to feel better emotionally too. Using alcohol or drugs to numb the pain of grief and artificially lift your mood will only serve to make things worse. Instead, attaining enough sleep, eating a healthful diet and getting plenty of exercise will help you to combat stress and fatigue.

 

4. Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel – including yourself: Grief is not a cookie-cutter emotion that’s the same for everyone; your grief is your own, and no one else can tell you when it’s time to “move on” or “get over it” – the same goes for what you tell yourself. You need to come to terms with things in your own way, whether that involves being angry, yelling at the heavens, crying, not crying, laughing or whatever else you need to do. Let yourself feel whatever you feel without embarrassment or judgment and remember it’s ok to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling, and it’s ok to find moments of joy, and to let go when you’re ready.

 

5. Be prepared for your grief “triggers”: Lots of events in life can reawaken memories and feelings about your loss. When you have an anniversary, milestone or holiday season coming up, get ready for that inevitable emotional wallop, and know that it’s completely normal. If other relatives or friends will be around during that holiday or lifecycle event, talk to them ahead of time about their expectations and agree on ways in which you can honour the person you loved.

Categories: Creativity, feel, feelings, grief, Grieving Process, nbsp, physical, Triggers

How to Navigate the Signs Between Grief and Depression

Death is an inescapable fact of life, which means that, unfortunately, so is bereavement. Nothing affects your emotional wellness quite like losing someone you love, but where do you draw the line between emotional wellness and mental health? Or, in other words, when does grief turn into a major depressive disorder?

 

Obviously, grief is different for everyone, and is different to normal sadness. When sadness affects your wellbeing, you can still describe why you are sad, function normally in the world and overcome the sadness within a relatively short period of time. However, when you’re mourning the loss of a parent, spouse, sibling, friend or even a pet, you can have intense experiences for days, weeks or even months. These include:

 

• Feeling guilt over the things you did or did not do before your loved one died


• Wishing it had been you instead


• Imagining you’ve seen or heard the dead person


• Having trouble sleeping


• Changes in the way you eat and exercise


• Isolating yourself from others

 

So that’s grief, but when does it become cause for concern? When does grief turn into depression? If you are concerned this may apply to you or someone you love who is following a bereavement, ask yourself the following questions:

 

1. Are you unable to focus or concentrate?


2. Do you have extreme feelings of worthlessness or guilt?


3. Are your feelings of depression and anxiety getting worse over time, rather than better?


4. Have you had trouble sleeping for more than six weeks?


5. Have you gained or lost an extreme amount of weight?


6. Do you have inexplicable physical symptoms?


7. Have you had suicidal thoughts?

 

If you’ve answered yes to these questions, you should seek treatment. This comes in many forms, including medications such as antidepressants and therapies such as interpersonal therapy and/or cognitive behavioural therapy. You can also stave off depression by getting some form of exercise for 30 minutes every other day, as this will increase the mood-boosting hormones in your brain. Plus, you can find relief by eating a healthy diet, doing the things you love to do, and connecting with your friends and family.

Categories: depression, Depression Symptoms, Emotional Wellness, grief, grief turn, nbsp, treatment

Experts Speak Out Against Plans to Classify Grief as Illness

Diagnosing schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is not valid or useful. This is according to the leading body representing Britain’s clinical psychologists, who say that, given a lack of scientific evidence to diagnose mental health problems as illnesses, there needs to be a “paradigm shift” in how the issues of mental health are understood.

In their statement – which has already prompted a fierce backlash from psychiatrists, the British Psychological Society’s division of clinical psychology (DCP) effectively casts doubt on psychiatry’s predominantly biomedical model of mental distress. In other words, they do not believe that those with mental health problems are the same as people suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs. According to the DCP, their statement ‘reflects fundamental concerns about the development, personal impact and core assumptions of the (diagnosis) systems’ that are used in psychiatry today.

One of the wellness experts who helped draw up the DCP’s statement was consultant clinical psychologist Dr Lucy Johnstone, who said it was unhelpful to see mental health issues as illnesses with biological causes. ‘On the contrary, there is now overwhelming evidence that people break down as a result of a complex mix of social and psychological circumstances – bereavement and loss, poverty and discrimination, trauma and abuse,’ she said.

But why are mental health experts saying this now? The DCP has timed their statement to come out just before the release of the fifth edition of the American Psychiatry Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5). The DSM-5 has expanded the range of mental health issues that are classified as disorders, hence the new statement. grief, temper tantrums and worrying about physical ill-health, for example, will now be classified as the mental illnesses of major depressive disorder, disruptive mood dysregulation disorder and somatic symptom disorder, respectively.

The writer Oliver James, who trained as a clinical psychologist, welcomed the DCP’s decision to speak out against psychiatric diagnosis. He stressed that we need to move away from a biomedical model of mental distress to one that examines societal and personal factors, noting, ‘We need fundamental changes in how our society is organised to give parents the best chance of meeting the needs of children and to prevent the amount of adult adversity.’

Categories: DSM-5, grief, illness