Exam 19: Lifes Final Exam

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Answers will vary. Much current "death education" suggests that hospital staff and family members can support dying people by understanding the stages they are going through, by not imposing their own expectations on patients, and by helping patients achieve final acceptance when patients are ready to do so. But critics note that staff may be imposing Kübler-Ross's expectations on dying patients. At the worst, some medical students and physicians attempt to have terminally ill patients experience a "good death" by breaking through denial of what is happening to them. Denial of impending death, to these professionals, seems to be a disease-like thing that they need to diagnose and treat. There are other critiques of the views of Kübler-Ross. For example, Kübler-Ross's stages are limited to cases in which people receive a diagnosis of a terminal illness. Retsinas points out that most people die because of advanced years with no specific terminal diagnosis, and Kübler-Ross's approach may not be of much use in helping us understand reactions under circumstances other than terminal illness. Edwin Shneidman acknowledges the presence of feelings such as those described by Kübler-Ross in dying people, but his research shows that individuals behave in dying more or less as they behaved during earlier periods when they experienced stress, failure, and threat. A gamut of emotional responses and psychological defenses emerges, especially denial; they can be observed in every death. However, the process of dying does not necessarily follow any progression of stages, as suggested by Kübler-Ross.