This Is What a Clinical Death Looks Like
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6192182 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Patricia Gillespie (The University of Melbourne, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 25 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 127-149 |
| Publication date | 2017-04-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Illness Crisis & Loss (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1054-1373 • E-ISSN: 1552-6968 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1054137315606831 |
| OpenAlex | W2471118134 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 20 |
Sickness, dying, and ageing are increasingly medicalized, focusing elder quality of life on interventions, that I argue, progressively strip autonomy, dignity, and privacy. For elders aged 70 plus years, personal autonomy, or the ability to “author” one’s circumstances, is poorly understood, and in clinical settings, often ethically vexatious. What matters to elders, as they approach end-of-life I argue, could be more meaningfully understood and supported via an experiential conception of autonomy. This autoethnographic case study, based in an Australian sub-acute geriatric rehabilitation hospital, explores what happens when the author’s 86-year-old mother, Marie, challenges clinical culture. Institutional barriers to explore a collaborative and empathic care practice, regarding sleeping arrangement, exercise, and nursing, resulted in Marie’s decision to die on her own terms—and highlights a need to expand institutional understandings of personal autonomy, the sanctity of life, and elder care beyond the pathological
Autonomy · Dignity · Experiential learning · Pedagogy · Political science · Psychological intervention · Sociology · Grief, Bereavement, and Mental Health · Law · Medicine · Mental Health and Patient Involvement · Nursing · Palliative Care and End-of-Life Issues · Psychology
‘And a Time to Die
Autonomy in Long Term Care
Dependence and Autonomy in Old Age
The Dying Process
Standing guard—being a relative to a hospitalised, elderly person
Hastening Death
The texture of embodiment
Auto-Ethnography
Do diseases have a prestige hierarchy? A survey among physicians and medical students
| Highly cited | No |
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