Healthcare Assignment: Resilient From Absent Grief Due To COVID-19

Question

Task: You are required to prepare a detailed report on healthcare assignment on the topic “Resilience from Absent Grief”.

Answer

Introduction
As per the investigation on healthcare assignment, it is stated that a normal response to bereavement and loss is grief. The global pandemic has transformed the lives of children and their families. People worldwide are grieving about routine, normalcy, and freedom. But the children are not in the same phase as the adults. They are at higher risk for mental disorders (Albuquerque, & Santos, 2021). They can hardly cope up with stressors, control or understand their surrounding environment. Facts suggest that anxiety and depression due to COVID-19 are common among adolescents. As per statistics, covid-19 will leave several grieving children with rates of about 2.2. The needs of such adolescents are not fulfilled leading to poor physical and mental health. More than 10% of adolescents who lost their loved ones due to COVID-19 experience psychiatric problems (Weinstock, et.al., 2020). There is a prompt need to address the problems faced by adolescents due to covid-19 and mitigate the consequences.

Resilient from absent grief due to COVID-19
Adolescents experience absent grief due to sudden death and major loss of loved ones. It is a situation when an adolescent does not respond to grief. Reasons that cause absent grief during the global pandemic are loss of loved ones, changes in health, schooling, and surrounding changes, major changes in life such as losing a home, or issues faced by parents such as financial shifts.
Covid-19 has posed an extreme threat to the health of individuals worldwide. In this challenging period, loss interweaves with multiple facets of life. Thus, failure to address the issues of each individual and their grief may lead to poor physical and mental health (Kang, et.al., 2020). In this crisis, it is necessary to promote the health and wellbeing of an individual and facilitate certain strategies to adapt to loss.
Major life changes and death are the primary losses. The secondary losses are often not paid attention to and may rise to a subsequent problem. Due to covid-19, children experience certain stressors such as loss of family, love, care, and companionship. These are the secondary losses experienced by adolescents who have lost their loved ones (Li, et.al., 2020). Children have no idea about life and death challenges and have no pathway regarding coping strategies, expected reactions, and feelings. Children usually have a long span of normal behavior and a sudden burst of anger and sadness. Such transitions between the behavior show the oscillation concept in the dual-process model. Adolescents are usually restorative, extra co-curricular activities might have helped them to overcome the situation of grief and sadness. In the current situation, access to activities is also limited (Loades, et.al., 2020).
Early intervention will help in identifying the mental health issues faced by children. Generally, the behaviors and symptoms are not recognized as being compared to the loss. Such unrecognized symptoms often lead to other mental health issues and create a significant impact on the health of children. Lack of social support, emotional resources in this crisis are a few factors that generate this type of behavior in children. The loss of loved ones hampers the social, emotional, and cognitive development of children. With the development of a child, the grief suppressed in them grows (Zhai, & Du,2020). Therefore, throughout a child’s development and lifespan, grief can exhibit in multiple ways and thus adds complexity in proper evaluation.
It is necessary to mitigate the grief by identifying and perceiving the several forms of loss. Primary loss is the consequence of secondary loss and often such situations are ambiguous and make closures tough. This could reinforce disempowerment, helplessness, and frustration in marginalized and vulnerable groups. Thus,the progress of grief can be mitigated and prevented.

Conclusion
Adolescents and adults are not in the same boat when considering grief in the COVID-19 context. Both adolescents and adults use different courses of action to deal with grief and to survive. It is important to deal with the needs of adolescents and recognize the differences. It is important to spread awareness addressing the needs of grieving children, the challenges faced by them, and strategies to prevent the complexities of bereavement. It is necessary to consider the cultural facets in the treatment of grief. However, this situation of grief can be considered as an opportunity to help the young vulnerable people through their catastrophic period. Mental health professionals need to focus on the grief pandemic and provide the adolescents with a sense of belonging. Thus, certain strategies must be developed to encourage mental health and wellbeing in this crisis.

References
Albuquerque, S., & Santos, A. R. (2021). “In the Same Storm, but Not on the Same Boat”: Children Grief During the COVID-19 Pandemic. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 23. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.638866
Kang, L., Ma, S., Chen, M., Yang, J., Wang, Y., Li, R., ... & Liu, Z. (2020). Impact on mental health and perceptions of psychological care among medical and nursing staff in Wuhan during the 2019 novel coronavirus disease outbreak: A cross-sectional study. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 87, 11-17. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2020.03.028
Li, Z., Ge, J., Yang, M., Feng, J., Qiao, M., Jiang, R., ... & Yang, C. (2020). Vicarious traumatization in the general public, members, and non-members of medical teams aiding in COVID-19 control. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 88, 916-919. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2020.03.007
Loades, M. E., Chatburn, E., Higson-Sweeney, N., Reynolds, S., Shafran, R., Brigden, A., ... & Crawley, E. (2020). Rapid systematic review: the impact of social isolation and loneliness on the mental health of children and adolescents in the context of COVID-19.Healthcare assignment Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 59(11), 1218-1239. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaac.2020.05.009
Weinstock, L., Dunda, D., Harrington, H., & Nelson, H. (2021). It's complicated—adolescent grief in the time of COVID-19. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 166. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyt.2021.638940 Zhai, Y., & Du, X. (2020). Loss and grief amidst COVID-19: A path to adaptation and resilience. Brain, behavior, and immunity, 87, 80-81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bbi.2020.04.053