The likelihood of an encounter with death is increased by excessive risk taking, occupational stress, accidents, environmental pollution, violence, war, and AIDS and other emerging diseases.
Life unavoidably involves risk, but personal choices and social conditions can increase our exposure to potentially lethal risks.
Whether natural or human-caused, disasters can be defined as life-threatening events that affect a large number of people within a relatively brief period of time, bringing sudden and great misfortune. The risk of death from disasters can be minimized when communities take precautionary measures to lessen their impact.
The aftermath of a disaster entails both meeting the immediate needs of survivors and providing adequate postvention support to emergency workers who are exposed to the tragedy of human suffering.
Disasters result from natural phenomena as well as from human activities, with or without warning. Community responding, coping, and grieving is a complex process that may take months or years to fully resolve.
Stress is a natural part of human existence, but its nature has changed markedly in modern times because of more complex life styles, rising expectations, and inner discontent. In Japan, occupational stress has been named as a cause of death from karoshi, or sudden death from overwork.
Accidents involve events over which individuals have varying degrees of control; thus, the choices we make affect the probabilities of most accidents. A consideration of such factors as carelessness, lack of awareness, and neglect can lead to a better understanding of how and why accidents occur. When accidents of all types are considered, young males are at greatest risk of death.
Interpersonal violence is officially recognized as a public health problem. A powerful encounter with death, violence in its various forms can affect our well-being even though we ourselves have not been directly victimized.
Gang warfare is comparable to other forms of war; the members of gangs have been likened to combat veterans, and the casualties to soldiers who have died on a bloody battlefield.
To reduce the level of violence in society, it is useful to consider how violent behaviors might be prevented. Creating a safe and orderly environment, eliminating conditions that underlie dehumanizing perceptions of oneself and others, avoiding the use of derogatory labels, promoting communication between potential adversaries, and communicating positive community values are among the methods that can lessen the potential for violence.
War abrogates the conventional social sanctions against killing by substituting a different set of conventions and rules concerning moral conduct.
Modern warfare is characterized by technological alienation and psychic numbing; moreover, the traditional distinction between combatants and noncombatants has become increasingly blurred, if not erased.
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a term used to describe a variety of protracted reactions to war, can also be considered as a kind of "delayed grief syndrome" that results from contact with the horror of killing and death and the absence of any formal rituals for grieving that might allow warriors to find solace.
Genocide—the systematic effort to destroy an entire group—was practiced with dire results during the course of the twentieth century.
Terrorism, another manifestation of violence, seeks to cause political, social, and economic disruption; in doing so, terrorists engage in planned as well as indiscriminate acts of murder, threatening our assumptive world and increasing our feelings of vulnerability.
AIDS is viewed in some quarters as the harbinger of an unknown number of emerging deadly diseases that will increasingly threaten the health of human beings worldwide. The threat of such emerging diseases is even more potent because of the political abandonment of urban areas in many countries, a situation that is intensifying conditions that cause rapid spread of infectious and virulent diseases. Such "urban desertification" is thought to be at least partially responsible for the reemergence of diseases believed to be under control, such as TB, as well as the emergence of new diseases such as the hemorrhagic fevers associated with Ebola virus, Marburg virus, and Lassa virus.
Traumatic deaths are often characterized by suddenness and lack of anticipation; randomness; level of violence, mutilation, and destruction; and multiple deaths.
They are out of the ordinary and shatter our assumptive world.
