Grieving Therapy

Grieving Therapy
Name:
Institution:
Grieving Therapy
Background Information
Grief affects all people at some point in life. Grief may be caused by death or any other form of loss. Moreover, this emotional disturbance affects people of all ages and all genders but at different magnitudes (Wong, 2013). Without proper management, grief can cause considerable damage to one’s life and extend to other members of the society with whom that individual interacts. Therefore, various mechanisms are coined to help people throughout the grieving people and restore the norm to the society.
In most cases, young people are neglected when it comes to dealing with matters of grief. Adults tend to think that children do not grief after the loss of a loved one because their ways of dealing with the loss differ from those of the older generation. As a result, most children develop permanent psychological conditions that persist in their lives until old age. It is, therefore, important to come up with ways that help clinicians design the best mechanism for handling stress and depression arising from grief in children of all ages. Using the similar mechanism to those used on adults to deal with children grief is a futile act, and so is designing a single mechanism to handle all age groups (Wong, 2013).
The best mechanism for dealing with grief in children requires one to separate children according to their developmental stage because the impacts of trauma on people lives depend on the stage at which they are in development.

Moreover, it is vital to choose the best approach between the counseling therapy and medical therapy to help children deal with grief successfully (Wetherell, 2012). The current paper will focus on grief as a whole and not just bereavement because even mere separation from parents and family can interfere with the emotional stability of the young people.
Picot Analysis
Picot Question
Does counseling therapy help with the recovery process more compared to suing medication therapy for ages 7-12 years.
Population: children between the ages of seven and twelve years
Intervention: use of counseling therapy to manage grief
Comparison: use of medical therapy to manage grief
Outcome: complete elimination of effects and symptoms of grief
The picot question seeks to establish the bets mechanism for handling grieving children especially those at the most sensitive stage of development, the pre-teens. Traditionally, behavioral and emotional issues were handled using talk therapy but recently, the use of medication to handle stress, depression, and anxiety has increased. The proponents of the medical therapy practice argue that the process is faster and provides the patient with immediate solutions. However, the viability of drugs in handling behavioral problems is still a matter of discussion. Emotional stress has deep issues that cannot be handled within a short time. Counseling therapy helps to uncover these hidden stressors and provide the patients with a coping mechanism that they can use even in the future (Wetherell, 2012). Failing to offer these coping techniques can lead setbacks and recurrence of emotional and behavioral issues among the kids. Further, research has indicated that children who make use of antidepressants often have high tendencies of committing suicide. With these findings, it is ideal to determine the best mechanism for handling grief by conducting evidence-based research.
Questions Related To the Issue
The effects and of grief on children aged between seven and twelve years
The symptoms of grief and how they relate to the child’s normal cognitive and personal development and the best mechanism to deal with these issues effectively
The signs of normal grief and extreme grief in children between the ages of seven and twelve years
The effects of medical therapy and counseling therapy comparatively on the long-term effects of grief
Various defense mechanisms that children use to cope with unmanaged grief
Question Chosen
The symptoms of grief and how they relate to the child’s normal cognitive and personal development and the best mechanism to deal with these issues effectively
Rationale
All the questions listed above can be quite useful in acquiring information about children grieving. Further, they are useful in determining how to handle children whose grief has exceeded normal rate. However, for the purpose of this research, question two that focuses on the symptoms of grief and how they relate to the stage of development in which the child is will be used to complement the picot question. The question was chosen because it allows the researcher to understand the immediate, intermediate and the long-term effects of grief thus making it easy to choose the best approach to emotional and behavioral healing for children.
Choosing the best mechanism will depend on the ability of the mechanism to eliminate both immediate and long-term effects of grief. Moreover, the best mechanism but allow children to open up because kids within the ages of seven and twelve have a tendency of shutting down and piling issues for fear of being seen as though they are different. Research has indicated that failure to engage the talking process whether in counseling or medical therapy can have the detrimental effect on the physical health, mental health and the behavior of the child (Wong, 2013).
Key Words
Grief, therapy, counseling, medical therapy, defense mechanism, immediate symptoms, intermediate symptoms, long-term effects, responses, bereavement, avoidance, instrumental and intuitive mechanisms

References
Wetherell, J. (2012). Complicated Grief Therapy as A New Treatment Approach. Dialogues Clin Neurosci, 14 (2), 159-166.
Wong, F. (2013). Helping a Child Cope with Loss by using Grief Therapy. Discovery_SS Student E-Journal, 2, 195-215.