Ideas, feelings about bereavement have evolved over the years
A century ago, when psychiatrist Sigmund Freud wrote about mourning and melancholia, grief was seen as a natural occurrence. Later, Erich Lindemann postulated grief as a syndrome, like a disease or medical process. Then, in 1969, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote of five stages of grief in her book, "On Death and Dying." Knowledge about bereavement has continued to evolve since then, say psychologist Jeffrey Schweitzer, PhD (at right in photo), and Brian Arizmendi (at left), a doctoral candidate at Upstate. They speak about the complexity of grief, the individualized experience of grieving and how therapists and researchers consider the process of dealing with grief.