She Developed The 5 Stages Of Grief, And She Was One Of The First Individuals To Pour So Much Work, Dedication, And Love Into Caring For Terminally Ill Patients
If you’ve ever lost a loved one or know someone who has, you’ve probably heard of the ‘five stages of grief.’ But do you know the woman who came up with that revolutionary theory?
Her name was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. She was a Swiss-American psychiatrist whose words and theories continue to help us understand the challenges of grief.
Elisabeth was born in Zürich, Switzerland, in 1926. Elisabeth was first introduced to the realities of death when she was hospitalized for pneumonia at the age of 5 and witnessed her roommate die peacefully. It was an experience that taught her death was an inevitable part of life.
When Elisabeth was only 13, she worked as a laboratory assistant for refugees during World War II. At 16, she left home against her father’s wishes to become a doctor and began working as a doctor’s apprentice.
She volunteered in hospitals and gained a lot of medical experience. Elisabeth learned how powerful compassion was during this time.
When World War II ended, Elisabeth continued to volunteer and help others through rebuilding and relief work projects. In 1946, she visited the Majdanek concentration camp in Poland, which greatly impacted her career and her life’s purpose.
Elisabeth returned to Switzerland to study medicine at the University of Zürich and graduated in 1957. There, she met her husband, fellow medical student Emanuel Robert Ross.
After graduation, Elisabeth moved to New York the following year and began her psychiatric residency at the Manhattan State Hospital. There, Elisabeth started creating treatment plans for terminally ill patients, which proved to be highly effective.
In addition, she began noticing how neglected mentally ill and terminally ill patients were in hospitals and catered directly to those patients.
In 1964, Elisabeth became an assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine. She started teaching students about the psychological treatment of terminally ill patients and wanted to work towards changing the care approaches for these patients.
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Elisabeth began teaching seminars and giving lectures on how to work with terminally ill patients and how to speak with them about death in a way that could ease any anxiety or worry. Her work became so popular that she was featured in Life magazine in 1969.
After conducting many interviews with terminally ill people and lots of research, Elisabeth wrote her revolutionary book, On Death and Dying, that year. The text outlined the five stages most dying people experience – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.
It’s a model that has been used as a training method for healthcare employees and has helped so many people understand the process of death.
Throughout the rest of her career, Elisabeth wrote over 20 books relating to death and psychology. In the 1970s, she started advocating for hospice care and was significant in establishing hospice care programs nationwide. She co-founded the American Holistic Medical Association and built Shanti Nilaya, an educational healing center in California, in 1977.
In the 1980s, during the AIDS crisis, Elisabeth worked with AIDS patients and conducted workshops for them in different parts of the world. In the mid-1980s, she developed the Elisabeth Kübler-Ross Center, which was relocated to a farm in Virginia.
In 1995, Elisabeth moved to Arizona, where she retired after suffering a series of strokes that left her paralyzed on her left side. She moved into a hospice program in 2002 and passed away due to natural causes in August 2004 at 78.
As one of the first individuals to pour so much work, dedication, and love into caring for terminally ill patients, Elisabeth truly had a tremendous impact on how we approach death in this world. Her legacy lives on as people live by her methods to this day.
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