On the Stages of Grief

On the Stages of Grief: Developed by Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross in 1969, the stages of grief consist of five basic levels. A popular way of describing these levels involves the acronym DABDA, which stands for denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Since Kubler-Ross spent time working with terminally ill patients, much of her early psychiatric research was published in her first book On Death and Dying. For the most part, she was motivated by the lack of medical school curricula that covered the topic of death (especially from the perspective of the mind). Thus, after a variety of patient interviews conducted at University of Chicago's medical school, Kubler-Ross was able to compile a series of lectures on how people come to "accept" death. Unfortunately, she regretted proposing each grief stage in a linear fashion. In other words, denial does not necessarily have to be the first grief symptom, and likewise, acceptance may not even be the last (as some people might never quite "accept" death as a reality). For absurdist philosophers like Albert Camus, questions of death can quickly become futile when one starts to question the actual amount of choices a person can make on a day-to-day basis.