Stories of grief and loss: How college students learned to listen

Abstract

To those who have suffered the pain of loss, grief is learned first hand. Although subjective and internal, grief is a definitive experience (Zisook S, Shear K, World Psychiatry 2:67–74, 2009; Howarth RA, J Ment Health Couns 1:4–10, 2011). But how do we learn about grief if we have not experienced it ourselves? Many medical and psychology students plan a career working with people who die and their grieving survivors. How will they learn about their patients’ experiences? In a college course on death and bereavement, students were given an assignment to interview an individual who had lost someone close and write a paper from the interviewee’s perspective. They were provided the type of questions to ask and training in empathic listening (Salem R, The benefit of empathic listening. http://www.beyondintractability.org/essay/empathic-listening. Accessed 10 May 2015, 2003). The resulting papers were emotionally touching to read and the best papers were analyzed according to the death experience reported by the bereaved, the grief process experienced by the bereaved, and by the type of paper written about this experience. This paper also explores an important question for medical and psychological training: can a person learn to understand an experience they have not themselves had?