The Wide World of Grief;
Colorado has become one of the country's
hubs for teaching, and learning,
Denver Westword
September 21, 2000, Thursday
the outskirts of Fort Collins. The dirt road leading
to it would be
tough to negotiate for anyone not driving a tank;
there are no less
than four sharp switchbacks, and potholes large enough
to lose a
microwave oven in. But those fortunate enough to
make it to the top
are rewarded for their efforts by a spectacular view
of Horsetooth
Reservoir and the city beyond, observable from a
series of structures
that quietly echo the natural beauty of the surroundings.
The founder of this development, Alan Wolfelt, lives
on the ridge,
too, residing in a palatial home near a pair of charming,
hexagonal
gazebos, one of which is fronted by a small, painted
figurine of
Little Bo Peep crying over her lost sheep. These
accoutrements are
linked by a wooden walkway lined with what initially
appear to be
lecterns; in actuality, they're "information
stations" containing
glass-covered pages that impart facts about the flora,
fauna, climate
and geology of the site. But all paths eventually
lead to the center
itself, a multilevel, hexagon-shaped monument to
the nurturing of the
human spirit.
Welcome to the complex that grief built.
According to Wolfelt, a brisk, remarkably intense
man of 46 with a
taut, compact frame, a penetrating gaze and the sweeping
hairstyle of
a TV newscaster, the building was originally the
swinging bachelor pad
of an English playboy slumming in the States. But
the reconfiguring
and redesigning overseen by Wolfelt, who bought the
property in the
mid-'80s, eradicated every last bit of hedonism from
its walls,
transforming the edifice into a mini-campus that
practically oozes
benevolence. "People feel better just being
here," Wolfelt says, and
after a trip to the "eagle's nest," a glass-enclosed
room capping the
center, few would argue with him.
On this day, Wolfelt is hosting a conference called
"Music, Meditation
and Memories," a retreat for bereavement caregivers
described in the
center's catalogue of educational seminars as providing
"natural
medicine for soul-starvation" via "healing
memory rituals" and regular
"periods of solitude and reflection." The
course is available only to
people who've completed preliminary programs that
are offered at the
center roughly once a month for a week at a time;
learners receive
continuing-education units through Colorado State
University's
Department of Educational Outreach for attending
the classes, with
five sessions earning them a certificate in "death
and grief studies."
Thirteen professionals from across the U.S. are taking
advantage of
this opportunity to join Wolfelt for happenings such
as the next
morning's scheduled sunrise observance, which will
ritually greet the
coming dawn. Wolfelt says, "My philosophy is,
when words are
inadequate, have ceremony." Tuition for the
seminar is $695, but
breakfasts, lunches and materials are thrown in.
Students are also taking part in lectures and discussions
on the
center's second floor, where each participant has
his own desk
distinguished by a name tag, a jar of M&Ms and,
conveniently, a
personal box of tissues. Their chairs face a fireplace
over which is
mounted an illustration titled "Wolfelt's Grief
Gardening Model." It
depicts a route through agony that takes sufferers
past dangerous
areas -- one is marked "weed patch," another
"nature of death" -- with
stops that encourage them to "acknowledge reality"
and "develop new
self-identity." Elsewhere in the room, a poster
delineates "My Grief
Rights," which include:
I have the right to have my own unique feelings about
the death...
I have the right to need other people to help me
with my grief...
I have the right to try to figure out why the person
I love died...
This graphic and others on similar themes are found
in a series of
placards that Wolfelt has produced to get the attention
of mourners
who may be reluctant to acknowledge their struggles;
they can be found
in funeral homes from sea to shining sea. In addition,
Wolfelt has
written more than twenty books published by his own
company, Companion
Press, including The Journey Through Grief: Reflections
on Healing,
Healing the Bereaved Child and How I Feel: A Coloring
Book for
Grieving Children, as well as a staggering number
of pamphlets on
seemingly every conceivable aspect of anguish, ranging
from Helping
Yourself Live When You Are Seriously Ill to Helping
Yourself Live When
You Are Dying. And as befits someone who's a nationally
acknowledged
expert in his field, he travels all over North America
(he has a
branch office in Toronto) giving grief seminars.
He's on tour as
frequently as a rock star with a new album: Next
week Pennsylvania,
Kentucky the week after, then Maryland, Rhode Island
-- and the road
goes on.
To his credit, Wolfelt doesn't pretend that his organization
is a
nonprofit: He's entrepreneurial enough to have ordered
up a nice
variety of Center for Loss clothing; logo-imprinted
T-shirts go for
$20 apiece, and sweatshirts and polo shirts are available
for $30. Yet
he gives not the slightest indication that he's anything
other than
completely sincere in his desire to assist folks
whose sadness, he
believes, is capable of absolutely obliterating their
lives. Sitting
in the center's office, which contains a calendar
showing his schedule
for the next year-plus, a vast collection of toys
highlighted by a
bike-riding E.T., and a frowning-clown painting by
the late comedian
Red Skelton, he says, "We impact thousands each
year, and I couldn't
be prouder."
At the same time, he's got to deal with frustrations
of his own --
particularly those that have arisen since the 1999
shootings at
Columbine High School, when so-called grief counselors
were thrust
into the limelight as never before. Since the assault,
some detractors
have implied that grief counselors are the equivalent
of
ambulance-chasing attorneys, waiting for a calamity
so they can pounce
on already overwhelmed victims for their own gain.
Wolfelt is still upset about being sucked into just
such a critique --
a May 17, 1999, Time article headlined "The
Grief Brigade: When
tragedy strikes, the counselors rush in. They offer
succor, but their
methods are up for debate." Amid comments from
numerous observers who
expressed reservations about the worth of the approach,
Wolfelt was
quoted defending the concepts he's spent his career
preaching: "Our
culture is full of buck-up therapists who want to
move people away
from grief. But you have to feel it to heal it.
You have to go
through the wilderness."
Immediately thereafter, the piece's author, reporter
Nadya Labi,
dismissed his observations with the line, "That
kind of sound bite
appeals to a generation raised on Oprah, but some
psychologists are
skeptical." The zinger hit Wolfelt where he
lives: After all, he's
been on Oprah, not to mention Today, where he chatted
with Katie
Couric, and Larry King's old radio show. Articles
like this one
prompted Wolfelt to pen a de facto manifesto taking
the media to task
for what he called its "flawed analysis"
and standing up for himself
and his calling: "Yes, some people may question
the need for what you
and I do to help people in grief. But I suggest we
stand tall and
stand proud. Because it is through having places
to 'story' that
people have the opportunity to try to make sense
of the senseless, to
embrace what needs to be embraced, and to reveal
that the human spirit
prevails."
Over a year later, he still thinks various elements
of the press are
misrepresenting grief counseling, thereby convincing
impressionable
people that there's something either dubious or sinister
about his
chosen profession. "When they go on about it
being an 'industry' --
that, to me, is tragic and sad," he concedes.
"What's the alternative?
Shouldn't we acknowledge the special needs of people
who've
experienced loss?
"I've worked so hard for so many years, and
then we have a tragedy and
people start to question everything I've ever done.
It strikes at the
root of my whole mission. But if someone goes through
a trauma, that's
an injury just as much as if there was a physical
injury -- and no one
questions that. If somebody is in a car crash,
we don't say, 'Should
we take them to the hospital?'"As Wolfelt emphasizes,
grief counseling
is nothing new: He's been at it for more than fifteen
years, and
others have similarly lengthy track records of helping
loved ones
mourn after the deaths of children, siblings, parents,
even pets (see
sidebar, page 28). But the term entered the public
vocabulary with a
vengeance after the April 1995 bombing of the Alfred
P. Murrah
Federal Building in Oklahoma City, the scope of which
(168 slain, many
more injured) shook not just family members and emergency
personnel,
but the rest of the nation to its core.The timing
of the explosion
coincided with the rise of all-news cable television
channels
desperately in need of compelling programming. Experts
on grief filled
their needs perfectly, providing dramatic testimony
about the ordeals
confronting the living that could be juxtaposed with
explicit imagery
of the dead. Never mind that a lot of what was (and
continues to be)
identified as grief counseling really wasn't; most
therapists label
their work with affected parties in the minutes or
hours after a
serious misfortune either "trauma counseling"
or, in the case of
emergency workers and the like, "debriefing."
It sounded good, and in
the end, that's all that mattered.
The coverage of the Columbine killings further codified
the grief
angle in most reporters' minds, especially locally.
Now there's hardly
a report about a distressing incident that doesn't
include something
about counselors. For example, a June 17 Denver Post
account about the
Hi Meadow and Bobcat fires underlined the availability
of counselors
in its subhead and throughout the article that followed,
and an August
17 Rocky Mountain News story about the drowning death
of Denver
firefighter Bob Crump made a point of noting that
his peers would have
assistance to deal with their feelings. Likewise,
the Post's Bill
Briggs, the author of a late-August series about
the high rate of
suicide in the West, capped a sidebar about a thirteen-year
old who'd
killed himself by noting that the boy's family had
undergone grief
counseling and was finding it easier to "smile"
again.
Taken cumulatively, these messages and many others
imply that grievers
have little hope of moving forward unless they seek
professional
assistance, even though much of the evidence supporting
such theories
is anecdotal; it's largely based on comments from
mourners who
describe counseling in positive terms. Yet they also
demonstrate that
editors have grown to understand that describing
the grief attendant
to tragic events is a way of keeping a story going
when it might
otherwise drop out of sight. Again, Columbine proves
the rule, with
headlines being generated by any semi-prominent figure
who's admitted
to feeling post-traumatic stress. Last October, when
rumors surfaced
that he was about to be given his walking papers,
Channel 4 anchor
Bill Stuart came forward to announce that he was
in treatment for
clinical depression fueled in part by Columbine (the
sympathy this
concession spawned probably saved his job), and the
August resignation
of the Reverend Donald Marxhausen, a Lutheran minister
who said stress
connected to Columbine influenced his decision, was
covered here and
in numerous locations across the country.
In reporting stories like these, the local media
has received copious
assistance from grief-counseling boosters at institutional
levels. It's hardly a coincidence that the U.S. Department
of
Education chose to stage "Picking Up the Pieces:
Responding to School
Crises," a three-day conference on school safety
that begins on
Thursday, September 21, in Denver. Nor should it
startle anyone that
one of the key sessions on Friday, September 22 --
"Responding to the
Psychological Aftermath of a Crisis: Columbine Shootings"
-- deals
with grief. Expect the press to notice.
Publicity like this cuts both ways. The leader of
the panel noted
above will be Betsy Thompson, the coordinator of
Jefferson County Safe
and Drug Free Schools, and the Jefferson County School
District is
listed as a "partnering sponsor" of the
conference as a whole. Yet Jo
Anne Doherty, vice president for clinical services
with the Jefferson
Center for Mental Health, and one of the primary
liaisons between the
mental-health community and Jefferson County Public
Schools, says that
the post-Columbine grief-milking has had many negative
consequences. "Some of the stories carried in
the media have
exacerbated people's grief -- stories that have graphic
detail played
again and again, stories that have a component of
blame in them," she
says. "Just the continued coverage of the Columbine
shootings is a
continual reminder. It's hard to get back to
a renewed sense of
normalcy when they open the paper in the morning
and see yet another
story."
Donna Reutzel of the Grief Clinic in Lakewood, a
private practice that
specializes in treating those seeking to deal with
heartache,
reiterates these observations using even more fiery
language. "The
media is willing to knock grief counseling, but they
don't knock the
biggest culprits of all -- themselves. They did and
still do profit
from this kind of thing. In the beginning of Columbine,
we needed to
be informed, and there was a lot of consideration
for the victims. But
when it goes on and on, it doesn't allow them to
have rest periods
from their grief, because it's in their face all
the time. And it
causes extra pain for everyday people who didn't
get such
notoriety. I've had many clients tell me, 'Those
people are getting so
much attention, but what about the loved one I lost?
What about my
pain?'"
These days, there is no shortage of counselors willing
to listen to
such inquiries. Reutzel, whose background is as a
psychiatric nurse,
became involved in the domain of grief early last
decade via the Grief
Institute, a Denver volunteer group and counselor
training center that
was founded in the mid-'70s, a period when far fewer
services of this
type existed. When the Grief Institute folded four
years ago, it did
so because, Reutzel says, "it had fulfilled
its mission." And true
enough, assistance for grievers is now offered by
countless hospitals,
hospices, churches, even mortuaries. Some of these
are overseen by
qualified professional therapists, others by those
whose expertise
comes from bitter experience.
"Many of them are simply people who've had losses
such as their infant
child dying -- so they'll start a newborn group,"
Reutzel points
out. "Suicide groups, homicide groups...you
name it, they're out
there." These organizations bring with them
an infinite variety of
philosophies, precepts and quirks, but a vast majority
of them preach
that grievers must share what they're going through
with others in
order to get a grip on their feelings. Likewise,
such people need to
be reassured that their reactions are normal and
to learn how to
handle those times when thoughts of a death or traumatic
episode
resurface, as they inevitably will.
For Reutzel, this last truism proved to be one of
the biggest
stumbling blocks she's overcome personally: In her
book Original Loss,
she writes that her inability to process the death
of her husband in a
car accident haunted her for 25 years. The tome was
completed in 1996;
she's working on a followup.News reports about traumatic
events -- big
and small -- often make it seem as if there's a local
Grief
Headquarters, where therapists prompted by screaming
alarms race off
at a moment's notice, shoulders ready for leaning
-- and although
that's not literally the case, it's figuratively
closer to reality
than many might expect."We have an entire team
of people qualified and
trained to provide immediate, on-the-spot counseling
in the case of a
traumatic event," says Dan Mosley, the chair
of the "disaster
committee" for the Mile High chapter of the
Red Cross. "There's always
someone on call and ready to respond."
Here's how it works: The Denver branch of the Red
Cross has a core
cluster of trauma authorities on call; right now
there are nineteen of
them, up from just five when Mosley got started,
and he predicts the
total will keep growing. Like Mosley, a licensed
psychologist, each is
a professional in the therapy realm who's undergone
special Red Cross
training sessions to further prepare him for the
specific trials he's
apt to undergo. (Training takes place at least twice
a year, supplying
a pool of people to call in case things get downright
biblical. Mosley
says the current list contains well over a hundred
contacts.)
The counselors, all volunteers, are placed in an
on-call rotation, and
if there's what Mosley calls "a triggering event"
-- an incident in
which "there's been death or serious injury
or people displaced" --
the point person will be paged by a representative
of agencies at the
scene (police or fire departments, most likely).
The pro in charge
will then direct a counselor or counselors to the
scene or go there
himself, ready to offer an open ear to anyone who
might conceivably
benefit from one. That's often followed the next
day by debriefings,
in which mental-health presentations are made before
entire groups.
On most occasions, the occurrences that precipitate
a call to the Red
Cross take place on a relatively small scale: a single
house burns
down, someone dies in an automobile accident. But
in his time, Mosley
has also made debriefing appearances before residents
forced out by a
fire at an apartment complex, a community upset by
the shooting of a
child, and those caught in the Buffalo Creek blaze
and subsequent
flooding, among other occasions. And when he was
acting as the
coordinator of the Red Cross reaction to Columbine,
he temporarily
found himself on the other side of the therapist:
His squad was
debriefed by representatives of the Mayflower Critical
Incident Stress
Management Team, a volunteer group that offers its
services to
emergency responders and hospital personnel. "We
really needed it," he
says.
(When the Denver Mayflower team was founded in 1985,
it was the first
in Colorado -- there are now ten -- and just the
third in the entire
United States. According to founder Patricia Tritt,
who's the program
coordinator in Denver and the state as a whole, the
primary difference
between Mayflower's approach and that of the Red
Cross involves the
makeup of the counselors. Approximately one-third
of the volunteers
are mental-health professionals, while the other
two-thirds are
specially trained individuals culled from the ranks
of the very
departments whose members the team counsels. "In
order to have
credibility with certain work groups or populations,
you need to have
peers as part of the team," she says.
"Sometimes it's difficult to go
into a fire agency or hospital as just a mental-health
person. But
when you're with their peers, you can.")
For Mosley, making sure that debriefers and counselors
know their
stuff is key: "After the Oklahoma City bombing,
you had all these
well-intentioned people showing up wanting to help
counsel people --
but unfortunately, some of them didn't have the training
they should
have had to be doing it." To that end, he not
only encourages his
fellows in the Colorado Psychological Association
to volunteer with
the Red Cross, but he takes every opportunity to
make sure he and his
current staffers are on top of their game -- hence
his role as the
chair of the Disaster Mental Health Services Committee
for a September
6 drill at Denver International Airport. The exercise
called for
emergency crews to test their readiness in the case
of a massive crash
at DIA, and in recognition that the Red Cross is
designated by
Congress as the primary agency to provide family
support in the event
of an aviation tragedy, a therapy team was on hand
to mock-debrief
mock victims of mock trauma. "It's good that
we get a chance to
practice our preparedness, too," he says.
Not that Mosley is rusty: As a participant in Disaster
Services Human
Resources (DSHR), the Red Cross's national system
for disaster
response, he traveled to Puerto Rico after Hurricane
Georges struck
the island in 1998 and pulled similar duty last fall
in North Carolina
in the wake of Hurricane Floyd. "I commit myself
to a block of time
every year," he notes, "because when there's
something of that scope,
the needs are tremendous."
The Red Cross isn't the only group with a squad of
counselors ready to
jet off to far-flung locales at a moment's notice.
In the event of a
major outbreak of on-campus violence (of which Columbine
is, for the
moment, at least, the most extreme American example),
the Bethesda,
Maryland-based National Association of School Psychologists
is
prepared to respond via the National Emergency Assistance
Team, or
NEAT.
Dr. Theodore Feinberg, the assistant executive director
of the
association, says that the Oklahoma City bombing
established the need
for NEAT. "There were so many children involved
in that terrible
tragedy," he says, "and two school psychologists
from Oklahoma called
our office in Bethesda asking for help. Then, after
sending one of our
members out to do what he could, we developed a group
of individuals
who had prior experience with major crises in the
country to be
available for communities in these kinds of situations."
Feinberg was
a natural choice, having volunteered for the Red
Cross during flooding
in the Midwest back in 1993, and his cohorts sported
similar
backgrounds: Two had counseled victims of hurricanes
in Florida, and a
third was a veteran of the Los Angeles Unified School
District, where
he'd had to deal with multiple shootings, suicides
and no shortage of
other unpleasantness.
A couple of years later, the rash of school shootings
began in earnest
-- so many of them that they began to be referred
to by their
settings: West Paducah, Kentucky (a fourteen-year-old
student killed
three classmates and wounded five); Jonesboro, Arkansas
(two boys,
ages thirteen and eleven, killed four students and
a teacher, leaving
ten wounded); Springfield, Oregon (a seventeen-year-old
killed his
parents and two students, and wounded more than twenty
innocent
bystanders). NEAT representatives -- at present,
there are seven of
them -- raced to all these scenes as well as numerous
others where the
carnage wasn't quite so voluminous: Flint, Michigan,
where a
seven-year old murdered a six -year-old student in
February, and
Lakeworth, Florida, which made news in May because
a thirteen-year-old
took the life of a teacher who'd chastised him for
tossing a water
balloon earlier that day. And Feinberg himself traveled
to Littleton
after the April 1999 assault on Columbine, when the
media's fervor
reached a new high.
An example? The first thing Feinberg was asked to
do upon arriving in
town was hold a press conference. "There must
have been journalists
from thirty different broadcast and print organizations
there," he
recalls. "And they had been there for quite
a while."
Whether the coverage fed the citizenry's distress
Feinberg can't say,
but when he oversaw a community meeting the second
day after his
arrival, "we were very surprised by the turnout.
We expected a
reasonable number of people; sometimes we've had
as few as 25 people,
50 people, and the most we'd had was in Jonesboro,
where we had
600. But in Columbine, we had 3,000. It was
a very moving
experience." He particularly remembers a conversation
with a husband
and wife whose son had been present in the school
when the gunfire
started but who had to that point refused to open
up about his
feelings -- "and as he was telling me about
it, suddenly the father
broke into uncontrollable tears."
Of course, Feinberg realized he would only be in
the Littleton area
for a short time and would be unable to counsel the
family
himself. But he was confident that there were others
who could provide
what they needed. "I told him that there was
an extensive network of
resources available to him right there in his area.
Extensive."
That's not the case in some other parts of the U.S.,
especially rural
ones, and many other countries are similarly
grief-counselor-challenged -- which is why NEAT is
in the preliminary
stages of developing a crew prepared to cross borders.
One NEAT
participant has already gone global, flying to Turkey
in 1999 to help
survivors of a devastating earthquake, and the organization
recently
presented a workshop to the International School
Psychology
Association that may well inspire "an international
response mechanism
for when there's a situation where trained folks
familiar with the
culture of schools are needed," Feinberg says.
"We've met with people
all over the world, and all of them have been quite
interested in the
work we're doing. So we're hopeful that our work
in this country
continues and expands, and that maybe the world in
general will become
a safer place for children."But what about grievers
who don't want
counseling?If there's anything that divides grief
pros, it's this
question. The politically correct line is to argue
that while
potential patients must be informed about the availability
of
counseling, they should never feel that they're being
forced to do
anything for which they aren't psychologically ready.
But in reality,
this probably happens every day. Many banks require
employees who've
been robbed to undergo debriefings, and a policeman
who's been wounded
or who's wounded another is all but guaranteed to
have a debriefing in
his future whether he wants one or not.
That's certainly the case in Littleton: Dan Stocking,
public-information officer for the Littleton Police
Department, says
the chief of police there has the power to order
his charges to be
debriefed. A 28-year veteran of law enforcement,
Stocking adds that he
can't remember any objections, in large part, he
believes, because
mental-health examinations are now such an integral
part of an
officer's life; they must undergo psychological testing
before being
hired, and they are often persuaded to seek help
when they're having
difficulties at home. As a result, Stocking notes,
a badge-wearer
who's been on hand for something traumatic understands
in advance that
talking with a debriefer will be on the menu.
Among metro-area units, the therapist conducting
such sessions will
almost certainly be from Nicoletti Flater Associates,
a collection of
twelve police psychologists overseen by Dr. John
Nicoletti and his
wife, Lottie Flater. The group has contracts
with police or sheriff's
departments in most area municipalities -- Denver,
Arvada, Aurora,
Wheat Ridge, Englewood, Edgewater, Thornton, Adams
County, Jefferson
County, Arapahoe County and more -- and Nicoletti
confirms that most
of them require officers involved in shootings and
the like to be
debriefed. But in his view, the obligatory nature
of the service tends
to ease worries rather than provoke them.
"It takes away some of the stigma," Nicoletti
says. "There's the
potential for both external and internal stigma --
external being
someone who asks, 'Hey, why did you have to do that?'
and internal
being the person asking that of himself. But if it's
something
everyone has to do, the person doesn't have to feel
something's wrong
because they have to talk. And also, if it goes to
court, some
attorney can't really say, 'Isn't it true you had
to talk to
somebody?' because that's required. It just makes
it a little cleaner
if it's mandated, if it's just something you have
to do."
Most often the debriefing consists of a single session,
with an option
for more depending upon the opinions of the clinician
and the
patient. To Nicoletti, such conversations are especially
important
when it comes to trauma, which he describes as "an
abnormal event"
that may be followed by grief but certainly isn't
synonymous with
it. "Trauma is a type of stress, but whereas
some stress you can get
out by exercising or going to a movie or whatever,
trauma doesn't get
resolved that way. Trauma has to be purged, and there
are basically
only two ways you can purge it. One is to write about
it, and that can
be effective as long as the person isn't putting
filters on and
sanitizing what he's writing about. And the other
one is to talk about
it.
"This doesn't have to be done with a professional,"
Nicoletti goes
on. "Some people can process trauma by talking
to friends or
mates. They just have to make sure that person won't
be judgmental;
they won't say something like, 'Why would you do
that?' or 'That was a
stupid thing to do.' But the important thing is that
they get it out
-- because if they don't, there can be real problems."
For Dr. Feinberg of the NEAT team, the incident that
best illustrates
this point was the first one to which his people
responded: the
abductions and murders of three young girls (one
in 1996, two in 1997)
in Spotsylvania, Virginia, by an assailant who remains
unknown. After
the disappearance of the last two girls, Feinberg
says, "we
immediately called the community and asked if we
could be of
assistance, and they declined -- which is certainly
their
right. Sometimes the press has indicated to its readership
that people
like us are just crisis junkies waiting for these
kinds of occurrences
to descend on communities, but we don't believe in
that. We only go in
at the invitation of a major player in the community
-- a mayor, a
chief of police -- and if they say, 'No, thank you,'
we respect
that. Even if we don't agree with their decision-making,
they
ultimately decide."
Three months later, Feinberg's instincts were proven
accurate, he
feels, when a Spotsylvania representative phoned
NEAT "to tell us that
they were emotionally paralyzed, and they needed
us to come down and
help them sort out the unresolved issues." Shortly
thereafter, NEAT,
in cooperation with the National Organization for
Victim Assistance
(NOVA) staged a "group crisis intervention"
for locals at which the
police chief, whose own daughters had been playmates
of the girls
who'd been killed, "broke down into uncontrollable
sobbing," Feinberg
recalls. "She'd been working feverishly, seventeen
or eighteen hours a
day, to find the perpetrators of this terrible crime
and had been
unsuccessful, which made her feel terribly guilty.
But no one in the
community thought she wasn't doing her job, and she
might not have
gotten their affirmation if she hadn't shared what
she was
feeling."Such tales only confirm to proselytizing
grief therapists
what they've contended all along -- that while not
pressuring people
to get counseling may sound nice, backing off isn't
necessarily in
their best interest.The Center for Loss's Wolfelt
thinks most people
live in a state of denial about mortality ("One
of my European friends
says, 'The first thing you should know about North
Americans is that
they think death is optional'"), and when they're
confronted with it,
their conditioning, which teaches them to embrace
the ideal of rugged
individualism, causes them to bury their genuine
responses for fear of
looking weak. Yet he says those not burdened by this
theory often have
problems as well, particularly if they don't have
any firsthand
experience with mourning. He claims that a considerable
portion of the
populace lives in "the world's first death-free
generation" because
many don't experience a close personal loss until
they're in their
forties or fifties -- and when these shocks finally
come, they're
unprepared to deal with them.
"That's why I do outreach," he says. "I
don't buy into the philosophy
that we sit back and wait. I believe in the role
of advocacy in
bereavement counseling."
In other words, anyone certain he doesn't need grief
counseling
probably needs it very, very badly. But this opinion
isn't universally
held. No scientific consensus has been reached regarding
the value of
grief counseling, debriefing or its various affiliates,
but
controversial data is surfacing that suggests it
may do more good for
outsiders wanting to help than it does for the mourners
themselves.
Little of this info is coming from the United States,
where relatively
few studies expressing reservations about grief counseling
and
debriefing have stirred waves; only a modest splash
was made by a 1998
report by New York psychologist George Bonanno showing
that grievers
who continually share their distress with others
tend to have more
difficulty coping than do less demonstrative types
-- a blow to the
if-it's-kept-inside-it-will-fester supposition. But
researchers and
thinkers in other countries have taken up the slack,
foremost among
them Simon Wessely, a professor at London's Institute
of Psychiatry
who's just published a survey of eight separate studies
about
debriefing that reaches some damning conclusions.
"There is no evidence that single session individual
debriefing
reduced psychological distress nor prevented the
onset of post
traumatic stress disorder," Wessely wrote. "There
was also no evidence
that debriefing reduced general psychological morbidity,
depression or
anxiety. All the modern studies fail to show any
advantage to
debriefing."
Even more disquieting were a pair of in-depth trials
-- one looking at
patients at a Cardiff burn unit, the other focusing
on victims of
traffic accidents in Oxford. In the former, Wessely
reports,
post-traumatic stress disorder rates were higher
for those who were
debriefed than for those who weren't; in the latter,
no statistically
significant differences between the well-being of
the counseled versus
the uncounseled were documented, with one exception:
Visibly upset
victims who were debriefed were worse off than analogous
subjects who
didn't receive this treatment.
Via e-mail, Wessely acknowledges that researchers
haven't pinned down
the precise reasons for these results, but he's got
no shortage of
hypotheses. He speculates that debriefing,
which is supposed to warn
individuals about the emotional responses they could
experience, may
actually increase the occurrence of the symptoms
by creating
expectations, thereby implying to impressionable
sorts that they need
professional help when support from their network
of family and
friends might actually be more beneficial. Even if
these conjectures
prove to be inaccurate, however, he feels the scientific
clues are
strong enough to warrant an immediate end to compulsory
debriefing,
which may inoculate organizations against potential
litigation but
also has "the capacity to do harm as well as
good."
How likely is this to happen? Not very, as Wessely
understands full
well. He knows that most therapists believe strongly
in the worth of
grief counseling and debriefing, guessing that many
of them are drawn
to these arenas because of what he terms "the
glamour of
disasters. They are exciting, and can be a lot more
interesting than
the often tedious routine of mental-health work."
Money, he believes,
isn't nearly as much of a motivator: "I think
pecuniary motives are
less relevant.
Tana Dineen couldn't disagree
more. A licensed psychologist living in
Canada, she stopped seeing
patients in 1993 after more than twenty
years because "I view
it to be unethical to practice when so many
bogus ideas are being sold
to people." Since then, she's remade
herself as arguably the
planet's preeminent psychotherapy critic via
her book Manufacturing Victims:
What the Psychology Industry Is Doing
to People, first published
in 1996, and regular columns in the Ottawa
Citizen. "I think that
as a society, we've just bought into this idea
that we need experts to
fix anything," she says, "and grief is
something that we've come
to view as needing to be fixed. So we pour
money into fixing it, even
though these technologies don't have a
basis to them.
"I saw progressively
more people calling me or coming to the office
who had the idea that they
needed help, and they'd gotten the idea by
listening to a TV show the
night before where some therapist was on
talking about how if you
don't handle your grieving properly, you'll
never get on with your life.
That presents the idea that there are
therapists who know the
right way to do it, when we don't know the
right way. But instead of
admitting that, we make people helpless to
help each other, and turn
something that's often entirely natural into
a medical-sounding problem."
That, Dineen adds, expands
the market for professional grief
counselors. Yet she doesn't
reserve her bile for people who make a
living doing grief work;
she also chastises charitable organizations
that support and promote
it, charging that they do so in part because
it's become such a reliable
magnet for donations. She's especially
critical of the Canadian
Red Cross, which got out of the
blood-collection business,
previously one of its primary functions,
following confirmation in
1997 that hemophiliacs had contracted HIV
and hepatitis C from transfusions.
In a column the following year,
Dineen suggested that the
organization was hyping its grief-counseling
component in order to prevent
its cash flow from ebbing.
"They were nearing
bankruptcy," she says, "so they shifted their focus
to grief counseling, which
was very popular at the moment, and gave
people the idea that they
were doing something to help. So instead of
sending something practical
to disaster scenes, like blood and
blankets and the things
the Red Cross is known for, their priorities
are now being shifted into
these phony 'helping' services, which is
absurd -- an incredible
waste of money and resources.
"What we have now,"
she continues, "is a large industry that basically
thrives by getting more
and more customers -- and the way you get more
customers is to expand the
concept of who is grieving. And you can
expand it seemingly endlessly.
We've reached the point where you just
have to have heard of somebody
dying. You don't even have to have
known them anymore."In
Dineen's view, the mental-health response in
the aftermath of Columbine
ably illustrates her point.The outpouring
of donations to a plethora of charitable sources
after the shooting
was staggering: The pile ultimately exceeded $9 million,
topping the
hauls raked in following any other tragedy, according
to an April 19
Rocky Mountain News article. The Healing Fund, operated
by the United
Way, took in about half that total -- $4.6 million
-- and when
divvying it up, the organization gave the largest
check, over
$775,000, to the Jefferson Center for Mental Health,
which used it and
other monetary sources to broaden the scope of its
services to an
unprecedented degree.
Before long, the center was issuing national press
releases at a
steady clip that hadn't slowed a full year after
the original attack:
An April 26 missive was headlined "Mental Health
Professionals in
Jefferson County Concerned About Release of Columbine
Videotapes,"
while a May 4 salvo announced "Jefferson County
Organizations
Concerned About Reporting of Suicides in the Media."
Meanwhile, grants
funded operations such as S.H.O.U.T.S. (Students
Helping Others Unite
Together Socially), a teen center that precious few
teens ever visited
(it's since closed its doors), plus the hiring of
a batch of
additional counselors to treat 4,800 locals between
May and December
1999 alone.
Nevertheless, representatives of a Columbine task
force formed at the
behest of Governor Bill Owens (including Jefferson
Center head
Dr. Harriet Hall) believed that even more Coloradans
were in need of
assistance: In August 1999 they requested $3.9 million
for additional
mental-health funding, which they wanted to make
available to an
estimated 3,701 Columbine students, teachers and
others at high risk;
17,952 Jefferson County residents and/or students
at other schools in
the moderate-risk category; and, at low risk, anyone
in the state who
may have been traumatized by either media coverage
or an excess of
empathy.
These predictions may seem extreme, but they reflect
the thinking of
most grief-counseling proponents contacted by Westword,
who believe
that even people who experience grief by association
can have
complicated responses that may not surface for months
or even years
and could well require therapy. But Governor Owens
wasn't sold, and he
reacted to the totals with a memorable sound bite:
"The people who
need their heads examined are the people who wrote
this report," he
was quoted as saying. "The class of people most
at risk from this
report are the taxpayers."
Appropriately chastened, the task force backed down,
leaving the
Jefferson Center to moderate its wish list. But its
current plan,
which is slated to take it through June 2003, remains
ambitious:
Clinical services vice president Jo Anne Doherty
says $1.6 million has
been budgeted for Columbine-related services alone.
Of that amount,
$500,000 or so is supposed to come from the philanthropic
community,
and with $300,000 already in the center's coffers,
there's a strong
possibility that the goal will be met.
When asked if this level of funding will be sufficient,
Doherty
describes it as "a loaded question" before
saying, "We have
prioritized, and it's our hope that this amount plus
benefits through
victim's compensation funds, health insurance and
other resources will
address the highest priority needs.
"But that's assuming there won't be any other
incidents in the
community that re-traumatize people," she warns.
"Columbine was
different than Oklahoma City, where there was the
bombing and then
that was it for the most part. Here, there's been
a number of serious
traumatic events that have happened in the last year
or so -- and if
there are more, we don't know what our needs will
be."
No doubt these events would be televised -- but could
such broadcasts
traumatize someone so badly that they'd need grief
counseling? The
Institute of Psychiatry's Wessely has a one-word
answer: "Aaargh."Alan
Wolfelt bristles at such dismissals. He knows that
getting in touch
with one's grief works wonders from countless sessions
with patients
and, perhaps even more important, from his own life.As
Wolfelt tells
it, he began his personal grief odyssey when he was
thirteen, after
the death of a friend from leukemia. "Adults
often assume that
children are too young to understand about these
things. In a sense,
then, I was a forgotten mourner. So I sought to understand
my own
experience" by, among other things, mowing lawns
for three years at a
cemetery near his home in Indiana.
He says that although he ate lunch each day while
sitting on a
different tombstone, "I wasn't weirdly obsessed
with death. I played
baseball, too." Still, he wrote his mission
statement for what would
become the Center for Loss at age sixteen and published
his first
book, Helping Children Cope With Grief, just three
years later. Then,
after completing coursework for a medical degree
at Indiana's Ball
State University and performing a residency at the
Mayo Clinic, he
moved to Colorado, where he'd fantasized about opening
a facility
dedicated to helping people with their grief -- and
there turned out
to be so many of them that he was able to settle
onto his own personal
mountain in just a couple of years.
By now, most of his dreams have come true: Not only
does he have a
gorgeous home, which he shares with his wife, Sue
(a family
physician), and three healthy children, but he's
able to meet with
hundreds of people all over the continent each month
and preach the
gospel of his personal bereavement model, which he
refers to as
"companioning" -- a kinder, gentler approach
to counseling in which
the caregiver bears witness to suffering without
attempting to stuff
it into any specific clinical pigeonhole. According
to an article he
wrote for a newsletter put out by Connecticut's Association
for Death
Education and Counseling, whose mushrooming membership
bears witness
to the growth of grief therapy as a whole, companioning
is about
"curiosity; it is not about expertise...learning
from others; it is
not about teaching them...walking alongside; it is
not about
leading...being present to another person's pain;
it is not about
taking away the pain..."
Wolfelt's also become a powerful proponent of the
funeral business,
writing columns in numerous industry publications,
including The
Director. He thinks funeral services are extremely
important in
helping people come to terms with death. "A
lot of people tell their
loved ones, 'I don't want a funeral when I die' --
but what does it
say to kids if, after you die, they just get rid
of you?"
A cynic would say that's the kind of thinking that
warms a
casket-maker's heart, but Wolfelt doesn't care --
or if he does, he's
not going to let that stop him. Indeed, the relentless
promotion of
the grief-counseling concept that he and his ideological
cousins have
maintained seems to be wearing down the opposition.
For instance,
Time, the very magazine that bruised Wolfelt last
year, put in its
September 4 issue a joint review of three books aimed
at helping
children grieve (including Parenting Through Crisis:
Helping Kids in
Times of Loss, Grief, and Change, by Colorado author
Barbara Coloroso)
that was generally positive and only the slightest
bit snippy.
Detractors remain, but Wolfelt is confident that
his ideas will
eventually win the day; he sees his pro-counseling
philosophy
branching out from Colorado, and the Center for Loss
in particular,
like vines in his grief-gardening model. And when
they take root,
everyone will finally realize that mental health
can be achieved only
by confronting sadness, not fleeing from it. "People
say to me, 'Isn't
what you do depressing?'" he admits. "But
it's really more about
opening up your heart and supporting people who can
then go on to hope
for the future.
"What I've learned," he says, "is
that grief gives you an appreciation
for the joy of life."
Copyright 2000 New Times Inc.
tanadineen.com
@ Dr.Tana
Dineen
1998-2003