مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد حاشیه سازی مذهب در سال های آخر زندگی – امرالد 2017

Religion, belief and spirituality are conceptual informants of how individuals experience death, dying and bereavement (Malinowski, 1954/2015; Becker, 1963; Kaufman, 1976). Example areas that illustrate this include the afterlife (Scheffler and Kolodny, 2013; Kaufman, 1976), coping with suffering (Wong, 2008), life review (Ardelt, 2003), ethical treatment decisions, to name a few. Sacred teachings set out the after-death experience: what follows, when and how. Such explanations or descriptions of one’s experience minimize anxiety for the unknown (Kim, 2008). In other words, religion, belief and spirituality answer the critical question ‘what happens after I die?’ In response to that, as well as considering holistic and person-centered care, spiritual care has largely developed in end of life (EOL) care over the last fifty years, ever since the hospice movement. Cicely Saunders, a well-educated Christian nurse, social worker, and physician suggested that the care of the dying patient should be holistic; it should cover all areas of care, including physical, psycho-social and spiritual (Saunders, 2005). Unlike Saunders, this paper considers spiritual care a sub-category, which normally finds place under the psychosocial care of the service user, and perhaps this feeds into the present argument. Despite the precision of spiritual care, the intentions, as well the purpose that it serves, there were two stories written concurrently. One was about EOL care and the emergence of spiritual care as briefly mentioned above. The other was written by policy and politics, and it was concerned with service provision in overall. Even though the state was the core commissioner of welfare services, including healthcare, in the post war years, the church remained in its role as a service provider, but in a subtle form (Dinham, 2015), whether that was in the form of philanthropy, volunteerism or other forms. The division of service delivery between providers resulted in the psychosocial models giving way to the bio-medical (Pentaris, 2015). Approaches in end of life care became largely medicalized (Walter, 1999; 1994). Grief and bereavement are now often seen as institutionalized conditions, rather than natural expressions. Starting with the well renowned 5 stages model by Kübler-Ross (1969), the emergence of all different models of grief might as well be considered an unintentional or intentional attempt to pathologise grief; to classify what otherwise cannot be measured, monitored, or on some occasions, even controlled.