Living, Dying, and Death: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Understanding the End of Life

Although in some ways death is the pinnacle of our life, a culmination of all that we've lived, we often don't treat it that way. Instead, we ignore it, actively avoid it, consider it a taboo even to talk about it. Yet planning for the end of life can lead to a better death experience, for us and for the people we leave behind. This course explores some of the reasons why death has been a difficult topic for people to approach and how that may be changing. Through a variety of discussions, projects, guest speakers, and field trips, this course addresses dying and deathfrom biological, psychological, social, and spiritualperspectives. Topics include historical and cross-cultural attitudes, psychological facets of coping with death at different points in the lifespan, the process of dying and definitions of death, healthcare professionals and treatment approaches for the dying, assisted death and other ethical/legal issues, grief and bereavement, mass tragedy and public death, and theoretical and empiricalapproaches to studying dying and death. PREREQ: Psych 100B
Course Attributes: EN S; BU BA; AS SSC; FA SSC; AR SSC; CFH MHA

Living, Dying, and Death: A Biopsychosocial Approach to Understanding the End of Life

PSYCHOLOGICAL & BRAIN SCIENCES 399

Section 01