Stigmatized Bereavement: A Qualitative Study on the Impacts of Stigma for Those Bereaved by a Drug-Related Death
Date
2023-09-19
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying
Abstract
Research has given limited attention to family and friends bereaved by a drug-overdose death. To examine the ways in which stigma may uniquely impact the grieving processes of the bereaved, a thematic analysis of 35 semistructured in-depth interviews with family members and adult peers who lost a loved one to an overdose was conducted. Our findings demonstrate that the bereaved experience stigmatization after their loss. Specifically, respondents emphasized stigmatizing interactions with law enforcement, alienation from friends and family, a lack of social support, exchanges that enforced feeling rules, and being confronted by narratives of blame and individual choice as contributing to the degrees of stigmatization they experienced. Our findings highlight how bereavement becomes stigmatized to varying degrees through multiple interactions that have a compounding effect on mourners. We refer to this process as stigmatized bereavement, whereby the frequency of such interactions informs the degree of stigmatization the bereaved faces.
Description
This article was originally published in OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying. Stout, J. H., & Fleury-Steiner, B. (2023). Stigmatized Bereavement: A Qualitative Study on the Impacts of Stigma for Those Bereaved by a Drug-Related Death. OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228231203355. © The Author(s) 2023.
Keywords
stigma, bereavement, disenfranchised grief, drug-related death, death
Citation
Stout, J. H., & Fleury-Steiner, B. (2023). Stigmatized Bereavement: A Qualitative Study on the Impacts of Stigma for Those Bereaved by a Drug-Related Death. OMEGA - Journal of Death and Dying, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/00302228231203355