Bill Harvey: Getting in the right state of mind

Over the summer months I have been working with a patient who suffered significant visual loss in a short period of time. Their behaviour over these few months has reminded me of a long-running theory about the pattern of behaviour people adopt when they suffer sudden deprivation.

In 1969, an American psychoanalyst (stay with me here), Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, suggested people going through a bereavement seemed to follow a similar pattern of emotions linked with their adapting to the loss, namely an initial denial often resulting in isolation, anger, a period of bargaining or argument and eventual acceptance. The Parkes model of loss, developed a couple of years later, has been cited by many as applicable to the way some people behave subsequent to a significant physical or sensory loss – denial, followed by anger, followed by depression, followed by a variable degree of adaptation and motivation.