Setting an Agenda for Australian Death Studies (SAADS)
Preliminary Literature Review
As part of the SAADS project, the research team conducted a systematic literature review. Its aim was to capture the depth and breadth of the published academic literature on death and dying in Australia from the perspective of the humanities and social sciences (HASS).
The literature review took place within the following parameters:
Journal articles and books of an academic nature. This excluded self-help guides, industry manuals, and pop-psychology explorations of grief or bereavement
Publications that address death and dying in Australia in a substantive way. Works that mentioned Australia in passing, but did not engage in a detailed analysis of the Australian context, were excluded.
Books published since 1985 and journal articles published since 2000. The extended timeline for books was given in acknowledgement of longer publishing timetables.
Research conducted in HASS disciplines, as defined by The Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences. This resulted in the exclusion of, for example, the extensive body of work addressing end-of-life care from a medical perspective.
Only journal articles published in Mortality, Death Studies and Omega. These three journals were selected because they explicitly identify their subject matter and readership as pertaining to the field of ‘death studies’. This was also adopted as a pragmatic parameter for the purposes of constraining this literature review.
Material was assessed with a principle of generosity, whereby the default was to include, rather than exclude, borderline cases. Nonetheless, the parameters adopted necessarily mean that this review is an instructive starting point, rather than an exhaustive analysis.
The search yielded 80 published academic works, comprising 28 books and 52 journal articles. An analysis of the keywords and abstracts revealed the following trends.
First, the existing literature has a strong focus on the emotions of death on the part of those surviving the deceased, with a significant number of works addressing the themes of bereavement, grief, and mourning, and the associated emotions of depression, loss, and loneliness. These themes made significant appearances in over a third of the works. Within these themes, works canvas a wide variety of subject matter – from historical discussions of how mass grief, trauma, and bereavement manifested in post-war Australia to grief-related programs in Australian high schools, and the role played by emotions in organ donation decisions. What ties these works together is a close engagement with the emotions that, for many, immediately follow a death.
The second most prevalent theme in the literature relates to suicide, including discussions of suicide notes and suicide risk, as well as the experiences of survivors of suicide. Almost 20% of the reviewed works focused on suicide in some way. Many of these works focused on suicide in contexts that might be considered particularly Australian – in Indigenous communities, or amongst rural men, for example.
From here, the identifiable themes become less noticeable. For example, perhaps unsurprisingly given the recent reform in many Australian jurisdictions, voluntary assisted dying made repeated appearances in the literature. The number of works engaging directly with this topic increased sharply from the mid-2010s, although engagement with this topic represented around 10% of the total works. Closely related is the similar number of works that consider end-of-life issues and palliative care for the aged and terminally ill.
A broader theme of law, criminology, and politics can also be identified, with roughly 10% of the reviewed works engaging with these topics. However, this is not a cohesive body of work. Many of the works that address these themes are predominantly concerned with other issues – for example, coronial decision-making in the context of suicide findings, or the law related to voluntary assisted dying – and the engagement with law, criminology, and or politics is secondary.
A similarly broad, although more cohesive and dominant, theme is considerations of ceremony, rites, and ritual (be they from a religious, secular, or cultural perspective), particularly when combined with discussions of body disposal. Over 20% of surveyed works engaged with these themes in some way. Many of these works considered Indigenous funerary practices, although discussions of cemeteries and burial rites more broadly were also identifiable. Discussions of newer body disposal technologies – such as vertical burial or alkaline hydrolysis – have also begun appearing in the literature.
Finally, several features that are unique to, or at least more pronounced in, the Australian context were identified. This includes research into Aboriginality and Indigenous experiences of death, as well as discussions of rurality, and in particular rural men. As indicated above, these contexts are closely aligned with discussions of suicide in the literature.