York St John Communities Centre offers high quality and affordable counselling and mental health services to communities outside York St John University. Founded in 2016, we are based on the York St John University campus. We are part of the Research and Training Clinic Consortium (RTCC). We offer general counselling for a range of difficulties including depression, anxiety, stress, trauma, relationship problems, bereavement and loss.
Our 10-week bereavement support groups are free to access. We recruit via our private Facebook group, ‘Bereaved by Covid19. Coronavirus mutual support group’, set up in April 2020
Public attitudes, cultural perspectives and engagement
We see conversations about grief as one of the last taboos, and this inhibits openness. More easily accessible public information about grief is needed, to encourage discussion and end this taboo. It would help if employers better understood the uniqueness of grief, recognised each employee’s needs and responded flexibly.
We believe, based on empirical evidence, that effective support in the community comes from a recognition that each person’s grief is unique, and that compassionate listening and calm reassurance is all that many people will need. We believe that those in a helping role should not be prescriptive in their expectations, nor seek to guide through ‘stages of grief’. It is important to recognise that cultural and religious differences will affect what is regarded as ‘normal’ in the intensity and duration of grief. Helpers should be aware and respectful of those differences in education around death and dying, which should be an age-appropriate and culturally appropriate part of the curriculum, from the death of pets in the early years, to the value of ritual as children progress through school. Teachers should inculcate honest and open discussion around events of loss and trauma which affect children in their care. Teachers are well placed to recognise how to communicate in an age-appropriate way. Undoubtably, all health and social care staff need training in bereavement awareness and support. The breadth of training needed will depending on the role of the professional: from a basic knowledge of models and patterns of grief, through an understanding of typical grief reactions, to training in how to work with loss and grief.
Practical Bereavement Support
There is a need to raise public awareness, both of the importance of planning for death and dying, and what the nature of those plans may be. There are many ways in which this can and should happen. Posts on social media, articles in newspapers and magazines, features on TV and radio, leaflets in banks, building societies, solicitors’ waiting rooms and Citizen’s Advice Bureaus. Many bereavement services have held well-received events in supermarkets to raise such awareness and many of the leading retailers have been keen to participate.
The ‘Tell us Once’ scheme and leaflets have been very effective in helping with administrative tasks following bereavement.
Infrastructure and intervention
The funding for the bereavement support sector is woefully inadequate. Many free services in the UK are run via hospice bereavement services, and some have been cut due to inadequate funding of the hospice movement. Cruse does an amazing job using volunteers, but the volunteer sector risks perpetuating the expectation that highly qualified counsellors will work unpaid. Private counselling can cost anything from £40 to £100 per session, outside the reach of many, given that bereavement counselling and support is sometimes needed for a long time. Research indicates that nine people, on average, are grieving each Covid loss. This equates to 1.3 million experiencing loss and grief. Existing research suggests that a high proportion will experience prolonged or complicated grief, potentially leading to a worsening of the UK’s mental health and an overwhelming of statutory and voluntary services.
Assessment of bereaved needs is a very skilled task, and expert training is needed from those with knowledge and experience.
Services need to be culturally sensitive, as well as appropriate to the emotional and practical needs of the bereaved person. A good bereavement service recognises the holistic needs of grieving people and networks with other organisations in the locality to ensure that a range of approaches are available to meet the needs of bereaved individuals.
The impact of the pandemic
Covid-19 has exacerbated issues of inadequate funding, as the sheer numbers of people needing support has rocketed. During the lockdown periods, face to face contact was neither possible nor desirable, and the challenge was to come up with new ways of working online. Many services, including our bereavement service, have successfully risen to that challenge. We know that ethnic minority and socially/economically disadvantaged communities have been hardest hit by the pandemic, and research suggested that these groups are the least likely to seek bereavement support. We need to put effort into recruiting and training people from diverse social and cultural backgrounds in delivering bereavement support. The emergence of Online one-to-one and group support using Zoom or Microsoft Teams, has widened access, and our research across many services has indicated that this is an innovation likely to be retained. Our service has maintained a private and confidential Facebook group of over 600 members: professionals and those bereaved. Online work has given access to people with limited mobility and made support available for people in geographically isolated communities. We need evidence-based research into supporting people bereaved by and during the pandemic, to inform us of best practice. And the means to freely disseminate those finding to all stakeholders. We also need more counsellors and volunteers trained in bereavement support ready to take up the task should it arise again.
Do you have anything else you would like to tell the Bereavement Commission about how people affected by bereavement could be better supported in the future?
Our service has now hosted two online international conferences on Covid Grief: 28th November 2020 and 26th November 2021, bringing together, charities, campaigners and researchers and those bereaved, to reflect on the psychological and societal effects of Covid-19. There will be a third conference on November 27th 2022.
The findings of the Bereavement Commission, published 6th October 2022, are HERE