Summary Project Proposal on the Psychological Effects of Non-Normative Loss

Project Proposal on the Psychological Effects of Non-Normative Loss BEHS 380 6980 Professor Overstreet Ryan Donovan 7/6/2024   1. The topic that I chose to write about is the psychological effects of non-normative death on different individuals. Non-normative, or atypical, loss is essentially loss that comes in quite an unexpected way, such as through natural disasters, suicide, murder, or an unexpected illness (Koulenti & Anastassiou-Hadjicharalambous, 2011). Studying the effects that these kinds of events can have on your mind really can help those that deal with this cope and learn to get through these kinds of events, whether it’s a parents losing a child, or a child or adolescent losing a parent. The fact of the matter is that whomever is affected by it does not have time to prepare for the sudden loss and deal with confusion, anger and sometimes guilt or shame (Estavillo, 2020). 2. The academic discipline that will be used in this project is psychology. With psychology being the study of the human behavior and the mind, it will help get a better understanding of what they are dealing with mentally. For instance, a man might be mentally prepared to lose his wife, but he might start dealing with grief because of how she died. He might tell himself that it was not supposed to be this way, and then let that thought drive his emotions and change his outlook on life (Parkes, 1998). 3. Two things that I would like to find out about my project are the psychological impact that it has on a child when they lose a parent, especially if it’s an early elementary-adolescent aged child. I also want to discover the psychology behind someone that experiences loss due to a suicide. Both of these are extremely real, especially in this day and age. Lately, you can even find cases of young children expressing suicidal thoughts. While research has shown that this can be caused by various things, like disorders and outside influence, it is still very real and should be taken seriously (Mendoza, 2018).