Just a few generations ago, serious illness, like hazardous weather, arrived with little warning, and people either lived through it or died. In this important, convincing, and long-overdue call for health care reform, Joanne Lynn demonstrates that our current health system, like our concepts of health and disease, developed at a time when life was mostly short, serious illnesses and disabilities were common at every age, and dying was quick. Today, most Americans live a long life, with the disabilities and discomforts of progressive chronic illness appearing only during the final chapters of their life stories. Sick to Death and Not Going to Take It Anymore! maintains that health care and community services are not set up to meet the needs of the large number of people who face a prolonged period of progressive illness and disability before death. Lynn offers what she calls an "owner's manual for the health care system," which lays out facts, concepts, strategies, and action plans for genuine reform and gives the reader new ways to interpret information creatively, imagine innovative possibilities, and take steps to implement them.
A compassionate, shame-free guide for your darkest days “A one-of-a-kind book . . . to read for yourself or give to a struggling friend or loved one without the fear that depression and suicidal thoughts will be minimized, medicalized or over-spiritualized.”—Kay Warren, cofounder of Saddleback Church What happens when loving Jesus doesn’t cure you of depression, anxiety, or suicidal thoughts? You might be crushed by shame over your mental illness, only to be told by well-meaning Christians to “choose joy” and “pray more.” So you beg God to take away the pain, but nothing eases the ache inside. As darkness lingers and color drains from your world, you’re left wondering if God has abandoned you. You just want a way out. But there’s hope. In I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die, Sarah J. Robinson offers a healthy, practical, and shame-free guide for Christians struggling with mental illness. With unflinching honesty, Sarah shares her story of battling depression and fighting to stay alive despite toxic theology that made her afraid to seek help outside the church. Pairing her own story with scriptural insights, mental health research, and simple practices, Sarah helps you reconnect with the God who is present in our deepest anguish and discover that you are worth everything it takes to get better. Beautifully written and full of hard-won wisdom, I Love Jesus, But I Want to Die offers a path toward a rich, hope-filled life in Christ, even when healing doesn’t look like what you expect.
The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.
Grief overload is what you feel when you experience too many significant losses all at once, in a relatively short period of time, or cumulatively. In addition to the deaths of loved ones, such losses can also include divorce, estrangement, illness, relocation, job changes, and more. Our minds and hearts have enough trouble coping with a single loss, so when the losses pile up, the grief often seems especially chaotic and defeating. The good news is that through intentional, active mourning, you can and will find your way back to hope and healing. This compassionate guide will show you how.
Inspired by the website that the New York Times hailed as "redefining mourning," this book is a fresh and irreverent examination into navigating grief and resilience in the age of social media, offering comfort and community for coping with the mess of loss through candid original essays from a variety of voices, accompanied by gorgeous two-color illustrations and wry infographics. At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it’s clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let’s face it: most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We’re awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit. Enter Rebecca Soffer and Gabrielle Birkner, who can help us do better. Each having lost parents as young adults, they co-founded Modern Loss, responding to a need to change the dialogue around the messy experience of grief. Now, in this wise and often funny book, they offer the insights of the Modern Loss community to help us cry, laugh, grieve, identify, and—above all—empathize. Soffer and Birkner, along with forty guest contributors including Lucy Kalanithi, singer Amanda Palmer, and CNN’s Brian Stelter, reveal their own stories on a wide range of topics including triggers, sex, secrets, and inheritance. Accompanied by beautiful hand-drawn illustrations and witty "how to" cartoons, each contribution provides a unique perspective on loss as well as a remarkable life-affirming message. Brutally honest and inspiring, Modern Loss invites us to talk intimately and humorously about grief, helping us confront the humanity (and mortality) we all share. Beginners welcome.
This book examines the ways in which contemporary works of black satire make black racial madness legible in ways that allow us to see the connections between suffering from racism and suffering from mental illness. Showing how an understanding of racism as a root cause of mental and emotional instability complicates the ways in which we think about racialized identity formation and the limits of socially accepted definitions of (in)sanity, it concentrates on the unique ability of the genre of black satire to make knowable not only general qualities of mental illness that are so often feared or ignored, but also how structures of racism contribute a specific dimension to how we understand the different ways in which people of color, especially black people, experience and integrate mental instability into their own understandings of subjecthood. Drawing on theories from ethnic studies, popular culture studies, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and trauma theory to offer critical textual analyses of five different instances of new millennial black satire in television, film, and literature – the television show Chappelle’s Show, the Spike Lee film Bamboozled, the novel The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty, the novels Erasure and I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett, and the television show Key & Peele – Crazy Funny presents an account of the ways in which contemporary black satire rejects the boundaries between sanity and insanity as a way to animate the varied dimensions of being a racialized subject in a racist society.
The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life globally through virus-related mortality and morbidity and the social and economic impacts of actions taken to stop the virus’ spread. It became evident early on during the pandemic that older adults are especially vulnerable to morbidity and mortality from COVID-19, and the adverse consequences of strategies taken to mitigate its effects. While no more likely to become infected than younger populations, the risk for hospitalization and death rises considerably with age. Residents of long-term care facilities have been among the hardest hit. The pandemic has brought many facets of ageism to the fore. Community stay-at-home messages, lockdowns, social distancing requirements, and visitation restrictions contributed to a concomitant epidemic in social isolation and loneliness. Economic and social impacts have been dramatic; so too has been the disproportionate hardship experienced by members of racial and ethnic minority communities. This book reports original empirical research and perspectives on the ramifications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the older adult population, and draws lessons for policy, research, and practice. Key issues pertaining to the impact of COVID-19 on older adults and their families, caregivers, and communities are highlighted. Four main areas are examined: personal experiences with COVID-19; long-term care system impacts; end-of-life care; and technology and innovation. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Aging & Social Policy.
When a loved one dies we mourn our loss. We take comfort in the rituals that mark the passing, and we turn to those around us for support. But what happens when there is no closure, when a family member or a friend who may be still alive is lost to us nonetheless? How, for example, does the mother whose soldier son is missing in action, or the family of an Alzheimer's patient who is suffering from severe dementia, deal with the uncertainty surrounding this kind of loss? In this sensitive and lucid account, Pauline Boss explains that, all too often, those confronted with such ambiguous loss fluctuate between hope and hopelessness. Suffered too long, these emotions can deaden feeling and make it impossible for people to move on with their lives. Yet the central message of this book is that they can move on. Drawing on her research and clinical experience, Boss suggests strategies that can cushion the pain and help families come to terms with their grief. Her work features the heartening narratives of those who cope with ambiguous loss and manage to leave their sadness behind, including those who have lost family members to divorce, immigration, adoption, chronic mental illness, and brain injury. With its message of hope, this eloquent book offers guidance and understanding to those struggling to regain their lives. Table of Contents: 1. Frozen Grief 2. Leaving without Goodbye 3. Goodbye without Leaving 4. Mixed Emotions 5. Ups and Downs 6. The Family Gamble 7. The Turning Point 8. Making Sense out of Ambiguity 9. The Benefit of a Doubt Notes Acknowledgments Reviews of this book: You will find yourself thinking about the issues discussed in this book long after you put it down and perhaps wishing you had extra copies for friends and family members who might benefit from knowing that their sorrows are not unique...This book's value lies in its giving a name to a force many of us will confront--sadly, more than once--and providing personal stories based on 20 years of interviews and research. --Pamela Gerhardt, Washington Post Reviews of this book: A compassionate exploration of the effects of ambiguous loss and how those experiencing it handle this most devastating of losses ... Boss's approach is to encourage families to talk together, to reach a consensus about how to mourn that which has been lost and how to celebrate that which remains. Her simple stories of families doing just that contain lessons for all. Insightful, practical, and refreshingly free of psychobabble. --Kirkus Review Reviews of this book: Engagingly written and richly rewarding, this title presents what Boss has learned from many years of treating individuals and families suffering from uncertain or incomplete loss...The obvious depth of the author's understanding of sufferers of ambiguous loss and the facility with which she communicates that understanding make this a book to be recommended. --R. R. Cornellius, Choice Reviews of this book: Written for a wide readership, the concepts of ambiguous loss take immediate form through the many provocative examples and stories Boss includes, All readers will find stories with which they will relate...Sensitive, grounded and practical, this book should, in my estimation, be required reading for family practitioners. --Ted Bowman, Family Forum Reviews of this book: Dr. Boss describes [the] all-too-common phenomenon [of unresolved grief] as resulting from either of two circumstances: when the lost person is still physically present but emotionally absent or when the lost person is physically absent but still emotionally present. In addition to senility, physical presence but psychological absence may result, for example, when a person is suffering from a serious mental disorder like schizophrenia or depression or debilitating neurological damage from an accident or severe stroke, when a person abuses drugs or alcohol, when a child is autistic or when a spouse is a workaholic who is not really 'there' even when he or she is at home...Cases of physical absence with continuing psychological presence typically occur when a soldier is missing in action, when a child disappears and is not found, when a former lover or spouse is still very much missed, when a child 'loses' a parent to divorce or when people are separated from their loved ones by immigration...Professionals familiar with Dr. Boss's work emphasised that people suffering from ambiguous loss were not mentally ill, but were just stuck and needed help getting past the barrier or unresolved grief so that they could get on with their lives. --Asian Age Combining her talents as a compassionate family therapist and a creative researcher, Pauline Boss eloquently shows the many and complex ways that people can cope with the inevitable losses in contemporary family life. A wise book, and certain to become a classic. --Constance R. Ahrons, author of The Good Divorce A powerful and healing book. Families experiencing ambiguous loss will find strategies for seeing what aspects of their loved ones remain, and for understanding and grieving what they have lost. Pauline Boss offers us both insight and clarity. --Kathy Weingarten, Ph.D, The Family Institute of Cambridge, Harvard Medical School
Homeless at age 14, Kris used his athletic ability to claw his way through public school and then nearly through college. However, the deep scars of his past began to take over. Broken and defeated at age twenty-two, having sabotaged his college team, his scholarship, his mind, and what he thought was the love of his life, darkness made its claim. Fed up, believing the challenges he and his siblings were forced to endure were vastly unjust, he gave up all belief and hope in God. Having a near death experience, Kris was still unable to overcome his atheist beliefs. In addition, as astonishing as being on the other side of the veil was, it did not convince him that God lived nor did he find the experience religiously significant. It was only after four years of deep dark depression that a real miracle took place. Read and find out how a boy and his siblings endured one traumatic set back after another. Then after finding what he thought were the keys to happiness, Kris had to face one more trial that threatens the very fibers that he has believed in. Was his childhood catching up with him once again or was it his strict obedience to Mormon doctrine that caused this latest collapse?
