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In the 1979 movie All that Jazz, film character Davis Newman comments sarcastically on Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: “This chick, man, without the benefit of dying herself, has broken down the process of dying into five stages: anger, denial, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Sounds like a Jewish law firm.” When it comes to death, there are a lot of opinions, few of them “evidence-based.”
Until recently, the same was true about the human distress that follows the death of others. Early studies of the state of bereavement and the process of grieving, like Freud's “Mourning and Melancholia” (1917), or the Coconut Grove Fire study (Lindemann, 1944), emerged from clinical, theoretical, and ethnographic approaches, and were often colored both by near cultural and historical events and the resultant emotional state of the author. Models of grief, such as those by Bowlby and Parkes (1970, 1980) and Kubler-Ross (1979), emerged from descriptions of those in clinical distress, even in those studies that were controlled. The emphasis was not on whether bereavement is a distinct entity, but rather, assuming it was, on describing the phases and symptoms of the bereaved.
In part due to these approaches, and in part through biases in the field of psychology to look for and believe in emotional expressiveness, the field of grief counseling came to assume that all bereaved persons had distress and depression, that their absence was a form of pathology,