Uhioug

Developmental psychology (PSY - 505)

VU
Lesson 15 DEATH

Death has, today, largely become a phenomenon of late adulthood. Advances in social sciences and increases in human understanding have helped us to understand the process of death more objectively and academically. A new field of study called as Thanatology has developed as a result of interest in death. The terminal stage of life is a significant and valuable portion of the life course. If people live long enough, they are bound to have to deal with the death of people close to them. Furthermore, the awareness that they themselves will die one day can impart a special appreciation of life's pleasures and can make them think about the values they live by. People can prepare themselves for the last stage of life by seeing others who are close to death, by nothing how death. By considering death, people can enhance life. They can live in the knowledge that each day may be their last, giving them a final chance to express their best qualities and is savor the sweetness of life. All deaths are different, just as all lives are different. The experience of dying is not the same for an accident victim, a patient with terminal cancer, a person who commits suicide and someone who dies instantaneously of a heart attack. Not is the experience of bereavement the same for their survivors. Yet all people are human; and just as there are commonalities in our death.

TYPES OF DEATH Today Death is considered to be a process, rather than a distinct process. Schultz have differentiated there different types of death these are as follows: 1. Clinical Death. Refers to the cessation of spontaneous respiration and heartbeat in some cases artificial respiration will revive the patient. 2. Brain Death. Occurs when the individual is deprived of oxygen for four of six minutes or more. The cortex, that portion of the brain controlling voluntary actions, thought and memory, dies first, followed by the midbrain, and finally the...