Helping Siblings and Other Peers Cope with Dying

Abstract

A family practitioner in Indiana as a routine part of his evaluation of a new family has at least one long interview with the entire family together to evaluate family patterns and interactions, with the belief that these will vitally influence the health and illnesses of all members of the family over time. A family therapist dealing with a patient with a major mental illness has sessions with the entire nuclear family, and at times even sessions with both sets of grandparents or other members of the extended family. An oncologist chooses always to discuss initial diagnosis, and any major new information with a patient and spouse together, to insure clarity of understanding and family communication. A parents group is set up for the parents of children with leukemia to meet and share their experiences, not only with their ill children, but also of the effects on themselves, their marriages, and their other children. At one medical center, whenever a child is dying, an attempt is made to meet at least once with the entire family to assess how all members are handling stressful events. Hospice programs stress the family as a unit of care during a terminal illness, and meet with them as a whole during the bereavement period to watch for problems that any family member might be having. In the last decades, practitioners of all kinds within the American medical care system are showing an awareness that illness, dying and death happen to individuals in the context of a larger family and social network where interventions can be both immediately beneficial and preventive of longer term problems. This awareness has developed over the past several decades as a counterpoint to the increasing technology of hospital based care, with its possibility of increased efficacy of treatment and risk of depersonalization. As with the development of any new perspective, it is a rediscovery of things long known, paired with a broadening and deepening of new insights, which only gradually win acceptance.