Holden, lead editor of The Handbook of Near-Death Experiences and editor of the Journal of Near-Death Studies, says that during these experiences people typically report that "they perceive their physical bodies, but often away from them-and they perceive and interact with transmaterial environments and entities such as deceased loved ones and/or spiritual beings." Some commonly reported features of this transmaterial environment include an altered sense of time and heightened sensation the perception of light including the often cited "tunnel of light" a sense of movement panoramic life review in which, typically, one relives each moment of one's life feelings of connection with others the cosmos or unitive consciousness and a sense of having reached a boundary which, if crossed, is intuitively understood to mean that one will not be able to return to one's body. According to Janice Holden, EdD, LPC-S, LMFT, NCC, ACMHP, a professor in the department of counseling and higher education at the University of North Texas, "About one in five people who survive a close brush with death report that during the close brush, they had a real or hyper-real experience of their consciousness continuing to function, usually extremely lucidly and from a position apart from their physical bodies." These include during surgery, cardiac arrest, traumatic injury, illness, accidents, suicide attempts, childbirth, and experiences associated with war and combat. NDEs have been reported under various and diverse circumstances. Given the difficulty of designing controlled experiments into what are spontaneous events often during times of duress, the debate is likely to continue.įor social workers serving clients who have experienced or witnessed these events, though, the debate over causation is often less important than other questions: What are the general characteristics of these experiences? What kinds of impact do they typically have on those who report them? How should social workers respond? Research into the origins of these experiences has posited various physiological, pharmacological, and psychological explanations as well as the possibility that consciousness, at least temporarily, survives death, but no definitive explanation has been proven. Sometimes referred to as deathbed phenomena or transpersonal end-of-life experiences, these include deathbed visions (DBVs) in which a dying person reports that they are being visited by deceased loved ones or other beings invisible to those around the bedside, and after-death communication (ADC) in which an individual has the sensation or perception of having been visited by a deceased loved one. Less familiar, but known to most social workers in hospice and other end of life settings, is that NDEs are part of a constellation of unexplained phenomena often reported around the time of death. Forty years later, most people are familiar with at least some of the elements that often constitute such an experience and there have been dozens of research studies published in peer-reviewed journals exploring the origins, characteristics, impact, demographic, and cross-cultural features of these experiences. In 1975, in his groundbreaking work Life After Life, Raymond Moody, MD, coined a phrase to describe what was then a largely unknown phenomenon, the near-death experience (NDE). Near-death experiences, deathbed visions, and after-death communication are phenomena that social workers in end-of-life settings say clients and their families encounter. Deathbed Phenomena in Hospice Care: The Social Work Response
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