Thanatology

Thanatology is the interdisciplinary study of death, dying, bereavement, and their biological, psychological, social, and cultural dimensions.

Death: The irreversible cessation of the biological functions that sustain a living organism. Thanatology begins with death as a biological event and examines its wider dimensions.
Brain death: The irreversible loss of all functions of the entire brain, including the brainstem, under specified medical criteria. Its criteria show how medicine distinguishes death from profound unconsciousness.
Complicated grief: Persistent, impairing grief that exceeds expected cultural and personal patterns of bereavement. Its assessment and treatment apply research on grief to prolonged distress.
Death anxiety: Distress arising from awareness or anticipation of one's own death or the death of others. Research on death anxiety examines how awareness of mortality affects thought and behavior.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross: A Swiss-American psychiatrist known for studying dying patients and proposing five stages of grief. Her interviews helped establish dying as a subject of psychological and clinical study.
Dying: The process by which an organism approaches death. Thanatology studies the experience and circumstances of dying, not only the fact of death.
Cardiac death: Death determined by the irreversible cessation of circulatory and respiratory functions. This is a major clinical and legal pathway for determining death.
Death education: Teaching and learning about death, dying, bereavement, and related ethical and cultural issues. It brings thanatological knowledge into schools, health care, and public life.
Terror management theory: A social-psychological theory linking awareness of mortality to efforts to sustain cultural worldviews and self-esteem. It offers one account of how mortality awareness influences social attitudes.
Cicely Saunders: A British physician and nurse who founded the modern hospice movement and advanced palliative care. Her work connected care for the dying with systematic attention to suffering.

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