Attitudes toward death are expressed in the mass media and through language, music, literature, visual arts, and humor.
From pioneering efforts in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, education about dying, death, and bereavement has achieved widespread acceptance.
Thanatology—the study of death—is composed of multiple dimensions and strives to create movement toward knowledge and actions that allow us to deal with death intelligently and with compassion.
Death anxiety and the related concepts of fear, threat, terror, and concern with the prospect of one’s own death encompasses practical issues that human beings experience in their encounters with dying, death, and bereavement.
Death education addresses objective facts and subjective concerns with courses offered through a variety of disciplines.
Our ancestors experienced death more frequently, and more often firsthand, than we do today. The reasons for this include changes in life expectancy and mortality rates, the causes of death, geographical mobility, displacement of death from the home to the hospital and other institutional settings, and advances in life-sustaining medical technologies.
Although many people no longer consider death and dying as taboo topics, society sometimes manifests features of death avoidance that hinder open discussion and acceptance.
The interrelated disciplines of death education, counseling, and care of the dying continue to evolve; one of the most pressing needs involves a deeper recognition of the diversity of experiences present in cosmopolitan, pluralistic societies.
Our attitudes toward death develop out of a lifetime of experiences with significant losses beginning in childhood and continuing into old age. Exploring the meaning of these losses and their influence on our attitudes and practices is part of a comprehensive study of death and dying.
The term cultural lag describes the phenomenon of a society falling behind in dealing with new challenges resulting from rapid technological and social change.
