from

Good Grief!

By Anne Kadet 06/01/2002 SmartMoney 108

Suddenly, it seems as if grief counselors are everywhere, and not just swarming the scenes of real tragedies; they're tending to employees whose co-workers were laid off . . .farmers suffering from too much rain . . . even librarians whose books were ruined; how did this industry get so out of hand?...

Turning to professionals rather than to friends and relatives also "weakens us as a society," says Tana Dineen, a Canadian psychologist.

A friend of hers who lives in a small north Canadian town told her about a couple there whose only child, their teenage daughter, was hit by a truck and killed. As a show of support, the townspeople took up a collection to give the parents a voucher for grief counseling. "Why didn't they just make sandwiches and pay the family a visit?" wonders Dineen. "What we need is much more of that awkward comforting and less of these sanitized professionals coming in looking at us as potential patients."