Because I've seen this twice today...
The "5 stages of grief" thing.
It's not real.
It's a reductive take on Kubler-Ross's research that lazy writers latched onto as an easy way to have characters proceed with grief, which the general puplic, seeing it on TV and film so often, accepted as real.
It's not, and Kubler-Ross herself denounced how it was being represented in popular culture, blaming herself in part for perhaps not phrasing her research better when presenting it to the public..
The theory was generated by a small sample size of people in nursing homes, all in palliative care, and all facing thier own deaths, not the deaths of others. The five stages were neither sequential nor universal, but were the five most common she observed people experiencing in that very specific situation. It was never meant to be an overall theory for the general process of dying, and was especially never meant for people who were grieving others who died. The universal application of it has done considerable harm to people, who believe they must go through those stages and get upset when they are "stuck" in one or fail to proceed from one to another.
There is virtually no empirical evidence for these stages and it's generally regarded as harmful pop psychology.
(And yes, one of the reasons this is a pet peeve of mine is because my degree is in psychology and I spent a year working in a palliative care unit, but as an administrator, not any sort of practitioner)
