The key techniques and strategies used during the initial phase of IPT to assess and develop an interpersonal formulation are described. IPT uses a timeline and an interpersonal inventory to expand the assessment of a client’s interpersonal events before, during and after the onset of the current episode of depression and identifies both the stressors and resources in a person’s interpersonal network. Assessment is described as a process that builds the therapeutic relationship through exploration, collaboration and compassionate understanding. As a result, sharing and co-constructing the interpersonal formulation can be powerful for clients, as many experience being truly heard and understood. This supports the development of a robust therapeutic platform, creating treatment goals and contracting for middle phase IPT work where clients actively bring in content aligned with the formulation and focus/problem area. In IPT, the assessment and development of an interpersonal formulation are essential elements whereby there is a shared understanding of a client’s difficulties through examination of their interpersonal relationships, social context and emotional experiences. The formulation in IPT acts as a map for the therapeutic process and guides the interventions to enable a specific targeting of interpersonal issues designed to alleviate emotional distress.

The prologue frames the Iliad and the Odyssey as poems that speak to the aftermath of violence. Rather than treating war as an episode that ends when fighting stops, it introduces the book’s central claim: Homeric epic preserves the textures of lived experience, including silence, grief, and the long work of rebuilding. It also explains the book’s approach, combining archaeology and close reading for general readers and students.

There have been several attempts to subtype depression in prior research, but none of them have gained sustained traction – with the exception of separating seasonal depression as its own subtype. Prior attempts to subtype depression have lacked a convincing theoretical framework. We present the rationale for subtyping depression based on evolutionary psychiatry, arguing that depression is not a single disorder but a heterogeneous syndrome comprising multiple evolutionarily distinct subtypes. From an evolutionary psychiatric perspective, a depressive episode may be (1) a prolonged adaptative response to a specific adaptive problem (thus representing a prolonged version of an adaptive short-term mood change); (2) a maladaptive state arising from an environmental mismatch as a result of modern lifestyle; or (3) a by-product of other adaptations. Depressive episodes caused by the latter two can lead to malfunctioning of the mood-controlling system. This can produce a pathological depressive state without any adaptive function. The 12 subtypes of depression discussed in this chapter are: depression induced by (1) infection, (2) long-term stress, (3) loneliness, (4) traumatic experiences, (5) hierarchy conflict, (6) grief, (7) loss of romantic relationship or romantic rejection, (8) postpartum events, (9) the season, (10) chemicals, (11) somatic diseases, and (12) starvation.

This chapter discusses how AI bots help negotiate some of the intense emotions and sense of vulnerability that come with grief. It considers both the promise and peril of AI-powered grief work, as well as how this technology is already sculpting our emotional life more generally. The chapter argues that AI ‘griefbots’ may, for some, be a useful resource for negotiating their grief. First, emotions and absence experiences in everyday life are discussed. Then the chapter examines how AI bots are increasingly used to address these experiences, before turning to a consideration of AI in prolonged grief disorder. The chapter offers a possible application of AI griefbots in narrative-based interventions to prolonged grief disorder, and concludes by raising some worries in need of further consideration.

When we expand exploration of death-related behaviors to include other-than-human animals, what might be learned about ways of expressing emotion around death? In this chapter I probe the contours of animal grief. Who in the animal kingdom grieves, and in what ways? Describing grief expressed by animals ranging from rattlesnakes to chimpanzees, orcas to elephants, and cats to dairy cows, I show that claims of human exceptionalism around grief and mourning can and should be challenged. Human uniqueness is not threatened by this stance, as our species’ mortuary rituals do indeed differ from others’. Understanding animal grief may not only enlighten us about the nature of human grief but also offer ways to think about ecological grief, the crushing sense of loss some people experience as the climate crisis forces changes upon the land, animals’ lives, and our lives. Throwing open questions that link animal grief, human grief, and ecological grief may sharpen awareness of our responsibilities to other creatures, a transformation that itself invites new paths of resilience and multispecies relating.

This chapter examines the placing of COVID-19 grief through ethnographic vignettes from three distinct contexts: the prolonged search by one woman in Guayaquil, Ecuador, to find and bury her mother’s body; the ritualized micro-eulogies and use of public health data that characterized Kentucky’s state response to the pandemic; and the community efforts to create a national commemorative space in Washington, DC, for lives lost to COVID in the absence of state recognition. Drawing on philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’s notion of the ethical imperative to care for the deceased, we show how individual acts of mourning – what we call “micro-eulogies” – confront the silences and erasures surrounding COVID-19 death. These quotidian practices of naming, honoring, and remembering the dead emerge alongside and against narratives of revisionism and calls to “move on.” In attending to the specificity of these three places – geographic, sociopolitical, symbolic – and the movement of individual and collective grief between the private and the public, the chapter explores what it means for the experience of COVID-19 loss to be located. It argues that localizing pandemic grief is an act of refusal, one that demands a collective reckoning and response.

Analysing formerly enslaved people’s 1930s’ interviews from the 1920s and 1930s, this chapter argues that enslaved people developed their own gendered, embodied and spatially defined standards for emotional expression in the US South. To control the bodies and minds of the enslaved, enslavers attempted to restrict bondspeople’s expressions of emotions. Though enslaved people navigated these rules carefully, they also developed their own emotional styles to express emotion as they needed to. In front of their enslavers and when separated from their children, enslaved women publicly expressed their grief despite enslavers’ attempts to restrict these displays. It was when away from the prying eyes of their enslavers, however, that enslaved people could express emotion as they truly desired. When engaging in religious practices on the edge of plantations, enslaved people created spaces of emotional refuge, where expressive emotional displays were encouraged. In creating these standards for emotional expression, enslaved people resisted their enslavers’ emotional restrictions, communicated their political ideologies and created spaces of emotional freedom that aided them in surviving slavery’s violence.

Chapter 1 argues that apocalyptic images and texts from the late Romantic period onwards respond to John Milton’s poetic treatment of temporality and grief in Paradise Lost, focusing on Mary Shelley’s apocalypse novel The Last Man. Shelley’s work, a project of revivification and memorialisation, challenges more conventional public narratives by embracing fragmentation and combining personal loss and universal catastrophe. In doing so, the novel draws on Milton’s epic, especially Adam’s prophetic vision after the fall. Shelley’s writings, including her letters, journals and Frankenstein, are read alongside John Martin’s apocalypse paintings and mezzotint illustrations of Paradise Lost. The chapter begins by positioning Shelley’s novel as a shared intertext for Martin’s The Last Man and Louis Édouard Fournier’s The Funeral of Shelley, both housed in the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. It argues that Martin’s Paradise Lost illustrations more closely parallel Shelley’s literary response to Milton: both recreate Milton’s prophetic temporality and express apocalyptic grief through reference to darkness and light.

Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of so it reads Theatre depicts the way the socio-climate of drought intenstified in Australia as settler farmers drought intensified in Australia as settler farmers cleared land to plant imported food crops and, in particular, rain-dependent wheat. Local ecologies were drastically changed by colonial occupation. Dryness and dust increased where there had previously been the biodiverse sources of food depicted in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander First Nations (First Nations) performance and drama. Different meanings for meanings for home and homeland exemplify the genocidal conflict between First Nations Country and settler farmsteads. Plays by, for example, Noongar writer Jack Davis and the pre-eminent Dorothy Hewett feature ecologies drastically altered by wheat farming in conjunction with oppressive race and gender relations. Drama about mining similarly shows a combination of ecological damage and social inequity. As Jill Orr performs in a vast monocrop of wheat and amidst gypsum mine waste, her bird-like action evokes in a vast monocrop field of wheat grief over an ecocidal loss of multispecies habitats.

Postvention describes the support offered after suicide bereavement to mitigate the risk of suicide in those affected by the loss. In this chapter we describe the international epidemiological evidence about the impact of suicide on relatives, friends, and other close contacts of the deceased. This includes an elevated risk of depression and suicide, and other adverse physical health and social outcomes. We describe the practice of postvention as it applies to recommended responses to suicide in clinical and community settings, and the evidence to support this. Whilst there is a lack of evidence to support the effectiveness of postvention in preventing suicide specifically, there is evidence that it improves the mental health and social outcomes likely to mediate suicide risk. Clinicians who encounter suicide-bereaved individuals should be aware of resources available to people affected by suicide loss, described here, including digital resources in the public domain.

The chapter offers provisional compass points for navigating new modes of writing by 21st-century Australian poets in light of a world of overdevelopment, environmental crises and extinctions. The compass points include: modes of anxiety and grief involved with poetic form, and material forms emerging in combination with agencies, matter and forces. Inflection points include the shared becoming of humans and non-humans. The chapter includes a discussion of ecopoetic literary journals, as well as anthologies that have gathered and showcased ecopoetry, radical writing of land, and environmental protest poetry. It includes analyses of poetry by writers such as Judith Beveridge, Louise Crisp, Coral Hull, John Kinsella, Peter Minter and Mark Tredinnick.

American Patriots argued the case for Independence in a distinctive emotional idiom that blended classical theories about the links between feeling and freedom, Enlightenment-era philosophies on the moral force of sentiment, and popular understandings of passion as the source of action. Together, they composed a Revolutionary spirit of liberty. Investigating the history of emotion in the Revolution allows historians to connect intellectual history (the study of political ideology) to social and cultural history (the stories of the revolutionary experiences and contributions of ordinary Americans). At the same time, it provides new insights into the vexed interrelationship of liberty and slavery in American history. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans and their descendants. Attention to the issue of Revolutionary “spirit” thus requires acknowledging the deep roots and enduring power of American racism, rather than simply accommodating the comfortable confirmation of the inevitability of slavery’s demise. Pro-slavery forces repeatedly emphasized the idea of natural slavery, the notion that the “slavish” nature of American bondsmen and -women arose from the supposed innate emotional and intellectual shortcomings of Africans. Yet a focus on Revolutionary emotion also reveals that even when members of the colonial upper orders tried to restrain the spread of liberty, they could not fully contain or control the spirit of freedom. Subordinated people, including white women, free and enslaved Blacks, and members of Native American nations worked actively to expand universal views of emotion, understanding intimately the links between feeling and freedom. Many Patriots took a more radical stance and argued that all Americans could lay claim to roughly the same set of universal emotions. In this view, natural feelings could bind all Americans together far more closely than cultivated sensibility had ever linked provincial elites with metropolitan aristocrats. Ultimately, novel theories of universal human emotions became both the foundation of Revolutionary organizing efforts and the basis for new theories of natural rights.

This chapter proposes new readings of the poems of Whym Chow: Flame of Love based on ideas of unconventional domesticity, alternative divinity, and queer, chosen families. The chapter explores the ways in which animal characteristics disrupt and subvert conventional poetic form and religious teachings in the volume, specifically elegy and Catholicism. It also focuses on connections between Michael Field’s writing and animal poetry found in the work of other fin-de-siècle and modernist writers. The chapter proposes that these poems can and should be celebrated for their eccentricity, oddity, and queerness rather than overlooked and marginalised within Michael Field’s oeuvre.

This chapter discusses how individuals approach the end of life within their particular social worlds. Focusing on the subjective processes of traversing transitions between life, death, and an afterlife, psychological anthropology analyzes how such transitions are simultaneously singular and shared, embodied and historical. The chapter highlights five themes. It shows how the end of life is a period in which personhood may be particularly unstable, giving rise to ethical demand to make, remake or unmake personhood. The chapter shows how narrative approaches shed light on the temporalization of living in the face of finitude. The chapter discusses how person-centered approaches reveal that the singularity of loss often exceeds moral and social attempts to contain grief. It discusses political subjectivity in psychological anthropology that highlights how historical inequality and violence settle in embodied disorders, hauntings, and abandonment. Discussing questions of empathy and emotion, the chapter concludes by drawing attention to the potential of ethnographic studies of dying and afterlives to theorize the limits and possibilities of understanding others.

Chapter 5 covers the topic of grief and prolonged grief disorder. Through a case vignette with topical MCQs for consolidation of learning, readers are brought through the diagnosis and treatment of a patient with normal grief and prolonged grief disorder. We also explore how to differentiate it from major depressive disorder. Topics covered include the symptoms, psychopathology, treatment including psychological therapies.