Kubler-Ross, Grief and the Pandemic

John Naughton:

Watching people’s responses to, and thinking about, the pandemic what often comes to mind is Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s model of the ‘five stages of grief’ which postulates that those experiencing grief go through a series of five emotions: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Over the years there’s been much debate about the model with critics lining up to point out that there’s little empirical evidence for it etc. My feeling, as someone who has lived through a bereavement, is that it’s useful not as a model but as a metaphor.

In that sense, I’ve seen something of each stage in people’s responses to the Covid virus in the last year.

This was written on the 16th January. Trump may be gone, and the new US administration taking Covid-19 seriously (at last), but here in the UK we’re currently stuck with a government unable and/or unwilling to tackle the pandemic, or any of the other crises facing us.