Disenfranchised Grief Essay

Loss and Grief is a very common topic that many people deal with at some point in their lives. Grief is one of those topics that is touchy and sometimes overlooked, but has to be dealt with in order for it to go away. One of the more difficult types of grief there is to deal with is Disenfranchised Grief. Disenfranchised Grief has to do with grief that is misunderstood or undervalued by others in society which as a result makes it harder for the grievers who are facing it to express or even address their grief in order to properly deal with it. Although Literature covers a wide variety of different types of disenfranchised grief, suicide will be the main topic of interest in this review. It is important to know about Suicide as a disenfranchised grief because it
Since suicide, in many societies, is considered to be something “shameful”, it is placed into the category of being disenfranchised for those who grieve over their loved ones who have lost their lives to it (Hagström 2013). This review will focus on mainly on the grief reactions of individuals who have lost their loved ones to Suicide and their coping strategies in an environment where they do not find the necessary responses for them to get successfully process their grief. It is common knowledge that Suicide is a fairly widespread phenomenon and that it happens everywhere. For instance, in an open narrative study conducted in Sweden, it was recorded that “About 650 adults (70 % men, 30 % women) aged 30–59 commit suicide in Sweden annually” (Hagström 2013). This article supports the aforementioned idea that suicide is not a concept that is well received among most societies in talking about the concept of “othering” among teenage girls who have lost their fathers to suicide. In the text, “othering” (also referred to as stigmatization) is described as