“IT’S DIFFICULT, DON’T TALK ABOUT IT, COMPLICATED AND A CHORE ” A comparison on the occurrence of death taboo between online forums for bereavement after suicide or loss of a partner Thesis Linguistics and Communication Sciences Supervisor: Enny Das Date: 18-08-2020 Tamara van Seggelen S4416821 Index 0.0 Abstract ............................................................................................................................................. 4 1.0 Introduction ....................................................................................................................................... 4 1.1 Terminological clarification .......................................................................................................... 5 1.2 Support groups .............................................................................................................................. 7 1.2.1 Forum on depression .............................................................................................................. 9 1.2.2 Mourning online ................................................................................................................... 16 1.3 (Online) mourning after a ‘different death’ ................................................................................. 19 1.4 Research aims .............................................................................................................................. 22 2. Methods ............................................................................................................................................. 23 2.1 Materials ...................................................................................................................................... 23 2.2 Selection ...................................................................................................................................... 24 2.3 Procedure ..................................................................................................................................... 25 2.3 Ethical considerations .................................................................................................................. 28 3.0 Results ............................................................................................................................................. 28 3.1 Top-down analysis ...................................................................................................................... 29 3.1.1 Findings in posts ................................................................................................................... 31 3.1.2 Findings in responses ........................................................................................................... 32 3.2 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 34 3.2.1 Death taboo ........................................................................................................................... 35 3.2.2 The forum’s technicalities .................................................................................................... 35 3.2.3 Relationship to the deceased ................................................................................................ 37 3.2.4 Summary .............................................................................................................................. 37 3.3 Bottom-up analysis ...................................................................................................................... 38 3.3.1 Support or empathy .............................................................................................................. 41 3.3.2 Providing information or advice ........................................................................................... 42 3.3.3 Disruption of one’s biographical narrative ........................................................................... 43 3.3.4 Losing a loved one................................................................................................................ 44 3.3.5 Nuance .................................................................................................................................. 45 3.4 Discussion ................................................................................................................................... 45 3.4.1 Providing support and advice ............................................................................................... 46 3.4.2 Disruption of one’s biographical narrative ........................................................................... 46 3.4.3 Losing a loved one................................................................................................................ 47 3.4.4 Nuance .................................................................................................................................. 48 3.4.5 Summary .............................................................................................................................. 49 4. General conclusion ............................................................................................................................ 49 2 4.1 Theoretical implications .............................................................................................................. 50 4.2 Methodological implications ....................................................................................................... 52 4.3 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................... 53 References ............................................................................................................................................. 54 Appendix ............................................................................................................................................... 60 A: Codebook bereavement forum ..................................................................................................... 60 3 0.0 Abstract The present paper integrated concepts and methods from death studies, discursive psychology, and communication sciences to provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the matter of online mourning. Previous research on online communities in mourning found that these were not that different from offline communities, in the sense that both help form communal bonds. In the case of online mourning after suicide specifically, studies show contradictions and inconsistencies, however. Combining concepts and methods from death studies, discursive psychology, and communication sciences, two descriptive analysis were conducted on a social media forum for grieving after suicide and for grieving after the loss of a partner. A top-down analysis, based on identified topics by Malik and Coulson (2010) and Pawelzyk (2013), showed that users interact differently on both forums. These differences may be explained by the different cause of death, the relationship to the deceased, and the introduction at the top of the forum. A bottom-up analysis, unbiased by prior categories but influenced by notions from discursive psychology, complemented the top-down analysis to disambiguate problematic categorisations, such as dividing the broad notion ‘requesting information or advice’ into separate the question categories ‘asking to relate’, ‘request for empathy’, ‘how are you?’, and ‘request for information’, and to define utterances that did not fit in any pre-existing category, such as describing negative traits of the deceased. 1.0 Introduction Society’s perspective on death has changed over the years. Aries (1981) described how a death affected a whole community during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century and was banished from the community at the beginning of World War 1. Religion and belief in an afterlife, which often helped people to face death, made way for the medicalisation of death. Doctors felt they had failed if a patient died and death itself became a taboo. In the 1960s, sociologists, psychologists, psychiatrist, and journalists started to defy this taboo by talking about it. Aries argued, however, that even though intellectuals talked about death, the subject was still taboo in the rest of society. In the late twentieth century, the understanding of death in a medical way became replaced by a psychological understanding (Walter, 1991; 1994). Bereaved people were encouraged to talk to counsellors and therapists, which ‘conveniently’ kept grief and death out of everyday life. At the same time, death became increasingly shaped by the dying and bereaved themselves, suggesting they feel freer to talk about the subject. Lee (2008) argues research into death and dying as well as public discussions about the subjects has grown in this time due to the emergence of parapsychology 4 and New Age emphasis on reincarnation, making death no longer meaningless and more accepted to openly discuss. He even goes as far as to say death taboo has been attenuated or even nullified. People still write about the death taboo, however, such as Crampton in The Times (2012): “for most of us the prospect of death is ameliorated neither by familiarity nor by religion”. He argues it is quite rational to avoid talking about death, a view that is in line with research on Terror Management Theory which proposes that people have