Episode Details

Losing a child, a parent, a distant cousin: the data says your grief isn't the same, and neither is what helps.

In this episode, I'm speaking with Dr Candice Mace, a clinical psychologist, research supervisor and sessional academic at Deakin University and The Cairnmillar Institute, where she also completed her Doctorate of Psychology (Clinical). Candice's clinical and academic work centres on grief, loss and trauma, and her doctoral research, in collaboration with Dr Russell Deighton, demonstrated the effectiveness of the Integrating Grief Program Victoria, a telephone-based grief counselling service delivered in partnership with Griefline. Her first study, published in Death Studies, found that brief telehealth grief counselling significantly reduced psychological distress among 197 people bereaved by sudden or traumatic death.

Candice explains why grief found her before she found it, walks through the difference between the acute and adaptive phases of grief using her ball in the box analogy, and makes the case for why the popular five stages of grief were never actually designed to describe bereavement at all. We get into why grief research has historically been so thin, what changed when Prolonged Grief Disorder was added to the DSM in 2022, and why grief itself isn't a disorder, it's a normal response that can sometimes need specialised support.

We spend real time on what her research actually found: brief telehealth counselling helps, but not equally for everyone. Losing a child produced the highest and most persistent distress of any relationship type. Cause of death mattered too, with cancer and drug overdose bereavements arriving with the highest initial distress, for very different reasons. And counterintuitively, people with only medium levels of social support sometimes did better than those with high support, because not all support is the support a grieving person actually needs. Candice closes by sharing her own experience of grief after losing her sister, and what she has learned about tolerating grief rather than locking it away.

What you'll hear in this episode:

• Why grief found Candice before she found it, and how counselling hundreds of bereaved people at Griefline shaped her research questions
• The difference between acute and adaptive grief, and Candice's ball in the box analogy for how grief changes over time, not in size but in how often it gets triggered
• Why the five stages of grief were never designed to describe bereavement at all, and why treating them as gospel can make people doubt their own grief
• Why grief has historically been under-researched, and what changed once prolonged grief disorder was added to the DSM in 2022
• What the Integrating Grief Program Victoria actually is, how Victoria Police refers people into it, and who it isn't designed for
• Why brief telehealth grief counselling worked, but not equally for everyone: the surprising role of relationship to the deceased, cause of death, age and social support
• Why losing a child produced the highest and most persistent psychological distress of any relationship type in the data
• Why cancer and drug overdose deaths arrived with the highest initial distress, for very different reasons, and what happened to that distress over six sessions
• Why medium levels of social support sometimes outperformed high levels, and what that reveals about the difference between well-meaning help and useful help
• What complex or prolonged grief actually looks like in Candice's clinical work, and how it differs from grief that simply hurts
• Candice's own experience of grief after losing her sister, and why she now believes in tolerating grief rather than locking it away

Connect with Dr Candice Mace

Website: https://macecp.com.au/

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