Podcasts
Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement Podcast Stream
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Podcast 11
In conversation with Dr. John Jordan
 | This is a podcast recording of a conversation with the 2009 international educator Dr. John Jordan. |
Dr Jordan is a licensed psychologist in private practice in the US where he specializes in working with loss and bereavement. He is also the founder and the Director until 2007 of the Family Loss Project, a research and clinical practice providing services for bereaved families. He has specialized in work with survivors of suicide and other losses for more than 30 years. As a Fellow in Thanatology from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (ADEC), Jack maintains an active practice in grief counselling for individuals and couples. He has run support groups for bereaved parents, young widows and widowers, and suicide survivors, with the latter running for over 15 years.
Jack is the Clinical Consultant for Grief Support Services of the Samaritans in Boston, where he is helping to develop innovative outreach and support programs for suicide survivors. Jack is also the Professional Advisor to the Survivor Council of the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention and a former Board member of that organisation and ADEC. In 2006 Jack was invited to become a member of the International Workgroup on Death, Dying, and Bereavement, and was the recipient of the ADEC 2006 Research Recognition Award. Jack also received funding in 2004 to begin a research project on the types of support and services needed by suicide survivors. He has also been working for several years on a research project to develop a new measure to help clinicians identify individuals at risk for complicated mourning.
Jack provides training for therapists, healthcare professionals and clergy internationally. He has published clinical and research articles in the areas of bereavement after suicide, support group models, the integration of research and practice in thanatology, and loss in family and larger social systems.
He has published in professional journals such as Omega, Death Studies, Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior, Crisis, Family Process and Grief Matters: The Australian Journal of Grief and Bereavement. He is the co-author of After Suicide Loss: Coping with Your Grief, a book on suicide bereavement for surviving friends and family. He is currently co-editing a new professional book on working with suicide survivors.
Podcast 10
The Six Year Mourning and Reconstitution Process of Widows of Firefighters Lost in the 9/11 Attacks - Presentation handout.
 | This is PDF document accompanies the audio recording of Prof. Grace Christ's keynote presentation presented at the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society in Melbourne, Australia July 15th to 18th 2008. The presentation is titled The Six Year Mourning and Reconstitution Process of Widows of Firefighters Lost in the 9/11 Attacks. |
Podcast 9
The Six Year Mourning and Reconstitution Process of Widows of Firefighters Lost in the 9/11 Attacks - Professor Grace Christ
 | Keynote presentation by Professor Grace Christ, Professor, Columbia University School of Social Work New York, USA given at the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society in Melbourne, Australia on July 16th 2008. The keynote was titled The Six Year Mourning and Reconstitution Process of Widows of Firefighters Lost in the 9/11 Attacks |
Dr. Christ is Professor, Columbia University School of Social Work in NYC and has clinical and research interests in the fields of psychosocial oncology, end-of-life, palliative care, and interventions in childhood bereavement and traumatic loss. Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia she was the Director of Social Work at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
Among other publications, she is the author of Healing Children's Grief: Surviving a parent's death from cancer, published in 2000 by Oxford University Press. Dr. Christ recently directed the Social Work Leadership Development Awards Program of the Project on Death in America that promoted the creation of a network of social workers and supporting organizations in this specialty area and is currently Chair of the Social Work Hospice and Palliative Care Network.
She is also Director of the FDNY-CSU/Columbia University Family Guidance Program for families in which a firefighter father was killed in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and a co-author of the book FDNY Crisis Counselling: Innovative Responses to 9/11 Firefighters, Families and Communities.
Podcast 8
Grief Therapy and the Reconstruction of Meaning - Prof. Robert Neimeyer
 | Keynote presentation by Professor Robert Neimeyer, University of Memphis, USA given at the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society in Melbourne, Australia on July 16th 2008. The keynote was titled Grief Therapy and the Reconstruction of Meaning. |
Robert A. Neimeyer, Ph.D., is a professor in the Psychotherapy Research Area of the Department of Psychology, University of Memphis, where he also maintains an active clinical practice. Since completing his doctoral training at the University of Nebraska in 1982, he has conducted extensive research on the topics of death, grief, loss, and suicide intervention.
Neimeyer has published 20 books, including Meaning Reconstruction and the Experience of Loss, Lessons of Loss: A Guide to Coping, and Rainbow in the Stone, a book of contemporary poetry. The author of over 300 articles and book chapters, he is currently working to advance a more adequate theory of grieving as a meaning-making process, both in his published work and through his frequent professional workshops for national and international audiences.
Podcast 7
Grief Therapy and the Reconstruction of Meaning - Presentation handout
 | This PDF document is a copy of a paper published in the journal Grief Matters: The Australian Journal of Grief and Bereavement in Autumn 2008. The paper by Neimeyer and Currier is titled Bereavement interventions: Present status and future horizons. |
This is a PDF of the paper by Neimeyer, R. A. & Currier, J. M. (2008). Bereavement interventions: Present status and future horizons. Grief Matters: The Australian Journal of Grief and Bereavement, 11(1), 18-22.
Podcast 6
Resilience, recovery, and chronic grief: Mapping individual differences after loss - Prof. George Bonanno
 | Keynote presentation by Professor George Bonanno Ph.D. Columbia University, USA given at the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society in Melbourne, Australia on July 16th 2008. The keynote was titled Resilience, recovery, and chronic grief: Mapping individual differences after loss. |
Professor George Bonanno, received his Ph.D. from Yale University. His research over the past 15 years has examined how adults and children respond to and cope with extremely aversive events, such as the death of a loved one, war, infectious disease, sexual abuse, and terrorist attack. In recent years, Professor Bonanno's work has focused more specifically on defining psychological resilience in adults exposed to extreme adversity and on the psychological and contextual factors that might inform resilient outcomes. This work has been funded by generous grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.
Podcast 5
Resilience, recovery, and chronic grief: Mapping individual differences after loss - Presentation handout
 | Handout to accompany the podcast presentation by Prof. George Bonanno, titled Resilience, recovery, and chronic grief: Mapping individual differences after loss. |
This is a PDF document which accompanies the audio recording of Prof. George Bonanno's keynote presentation given at the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society in Melbourne, Australia from July 15th to 18th 2008. The presentation is titled Resilience, recovery, and chronic grief: Mapping individual differences after loss.
Podcast 4
8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society - Plenary session
 | This is a recording of the final plenary session of the 8th International Conference on Grief and Bereavement in Contemporary Society which was held in Melbourne, Australia from July 15th to 18th 2008. |
This plenary discussion, which was moderated by Christopher Hall, Director of the Australian Centre for Grief and Bereavement, features contributions from the conference keynote speakers and includes comments by:
Professor George Bonanno
Professor of Psychology at Columbia University, New York, USA
Web page link to Prof. Bonanno's site
Professor Grace Christ
Professor of Social Work, Columbia University School of Social Work, New York, USA
Web page link to Prof. Grace Christ's site
Professor Robert Neimeyer
Professor and Director of Psychotherapy Research in the Department of Psychology, University of Memphis
Web page link to Prof. Neimeyer's site
Professor Mario Mikulincer
Professor of Psychology at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya, Israel
Web page link to Prof. Mikulincer's site
Assoc. Professor Holly Prigerson
Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, USA
Web page link to Assoc. Prof. Prigerson's site
Professor Margaret Stroebe
Professor of Psychology at the Department of Clinical Psychology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Web page link to Prof. Stroebe's site
Podcast 3
Loss and grief in 20th Century Australia: A historical perspective
Professor Pat Jalland, Professor of History, History Program, Research School of Social Science, Australian National University and is a distinguished historian with a significant international reputation in three very different fields of history - gender history, Anglo-Irish political history, and the social history of death, bereavement and old age. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, London, in 1981, and was the first female historian to be elected to the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, in 1988.
For over twenty years she has taught history to undergraduates and graduate students, and has been head of History Programs in three universities (ANU, Murdoch and Curtin). The first of Jalland's seven books, published in 1980, on the Irish question in British politics to 1914, is regarded as a classic text which is still widely used in university teaching in Ireland and Britain. Jalland's focus shifted in the 1980s to gender and life-course history, resulting in three further books. The most influential was Women, Marriage and Politics (1986), which won the non-fiction prize in the 1987 Western Australian Literary Awards. It used dozens of family archives to illuminate the experience of the life-course for women in politicians' families in Victorian Britain.
Professor Jose Harris described it in the Times Literary Supplement in 1987 as 'a major work, an admirably incisive and robust study. It symptomizes the emergence of a new kind of social history'. In the 1990s Pat Jalland embarked on an ambitious pioneering project to write four books on the history of death, loss and bereavement in Australia and Britain from 1840 to the present. She has received three ARC Discovery grants for this work: three books have been published (in 1996, 2002, 2006) and the fourth is under contract to Oxford University Press, Oxford, for submission by December 2007. These books explore the dynamics of change in attitudes, practices and emotional responses to death and loss across two centuries and two countries. This allows for considerable comparative analysis of cross-cultural influences and differences. The books analyse the contributions of religion, demography, two world wars and the revolution in medicine to profound cultural transformations relating to death and grieving. This research is vitally important because death and grief come to us all, but their history has previously been neglected for Australia and modern Britain. This comparative project has significant outcomes for our understanding of the histories of medicine, war, religion and old age, as well as policy implications for current issues such as euthanasia, cancer and palliative care.
Jalland's international influence and stature in this field have been recognized by favourable book reviews in a broad range of prestigious journals in the United States, Britain, Australia, Canada, France and Germany, as well as by invitations to give keynote lectures, conference papers and media interviews. Moreover, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford University Press, 1996) won the inaugural New South Wales Premier's Prize for History in 1997. Professor Peter Gay described the book in The Times Literary Supplement as 'a masterly monograph' which opened the way to a new historical understanding of death and loss. The second book in this series, Australian Ways of Death (2002) was reviewed by Professor Allan Kellehear in Victorian Studies in 2004: 'Jalland's excellent work will be widely viewed as a landmark resource for future historical research and social sciences debate in Australia'.
Jalland's most recent book, Changing Ways of Death in Twentieth Century Australia: War, Medicine and The Funeral Business, was published in February 2006. Professor Eric Richards in Dialogue, the journal of the Academy of the Social Sciences, considers it 'a model of the historian's capacity to invest even the most demanding subject with balance, span and perspective'.
Pat Jalland has commenced research for her next project, the first major book on the history of old age in Australia since 1860, a neglected field of great social and economic importance, and a national research priority. Her major themes include attitudes towards the elderly, demographic change, gender differences, poverty and social policy, and aged care and death. Jalland's history of old age in Australia will provide the first book which maps our experiences of growing old in the past, as a foundation for improved social and economic policy at a time of dramatic demographic change. The history of old age is a complex rather than simple story, and successful policy development will require a solid historical foundation.
Podcast 2
Lindy Chamberlain-Creighton - A mother and her experience of infant death
While on a family holiday on August 7th 1980, nine-week-old Azaria Chamberlain was taken by a dingo from a camping ground near Ayers Rock. After two inquests Lindy Chamberlain was tried and convicted of the murder of her baby daughter. A 1987 Royal commission found her innocent and revealed that a jury would not have convicted if the new evidence had been available. In September 1988, the NT Court of Criminal Appeal finally quashed the criminal convictions. In June 1991 Lindy and Michael Chamberlain were divorced. A third inquest was held and on December 13, 1995 Northern Territory Coroner John Lowndes once again cleared Lindy of all convictions although the 107-page decision did not determine the cause and manner of the disappearance and presumed death of Azaria. Lindy’s autobiography Through My Eyes was first published by Heinemann Australia in 1990. It was revised and updated before reprinting in 2004. On December 20, 1992 Lindy married American Rick Creighton. Lindy and Rick now live in Australia.
Podcast 1
Recollections of Horror: Longing and remembrance following traumatic loss
 | This podcast was recorded on Wednesday 30th November 2005 at Monash Medical Centre in Melbourne, Australia and is a recording of the Fifth Annual Grief Lecture which was presented by: Professor Alexander Cowell McFarlane Link to the Centre for Military and Veterans' Health |
Professor McFarlane is a recognised international expert in the field of post traumatic stress disorder. He is the recipient of the Robert Laufer Award for outstanding scientific achievement in the study of the effects of traumatic stress. He has published over 160 articles in various refereed journals and has co-edited three books. Apart from his interest in post traumatic stress disorder in relation to disaster victims, military personnel and other civilian accidents, he has broadened the relevance of this knowledge to the area of those suffering severe mental illness. His research has focused on the epidemiology and longitudinal course of PTSD as well as the neuroimaging of the cognitive deficits in this disorder.
He has appeared on radio and television, including the Four Corners, Quantum and Catalyst programs to discuss matters relating to post traumatic stress disorder.
Professor McFarlane is the Senior Advisor in psychiatry to the Australian Defence Force, Advisor to the Department of Veterans' Affairs on a scientific investigation of Gulf War Syndrome, Advisor to the United Nations on post-disaster situations, Advisor to the Kuwait government on post-disaster situations, Senior Psychiatric Adviser Australian Centre for Post-traumatic Mental Health Mental Health Consultative Group for the Australian Defence Force, Past President of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Past President of the Australasian Society for Traumatic Stress Studies, Member of the Scientific Advisory Committee for the study of Gulf War Veterans, Board of Research for The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists, Chair of the ADF Mental Health Research and Surveillance and Advisory Group, Head of Adelaide node of Centre for Military and Veterans' Health and Treatment Guidelines Committee, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.