I Am A Professional
Kristal – Professional Experience and Work
Kristal discusses being a peer support woker, working on a one on one level with community members to help them with their goals related to substance abuse. She supports those in the community dealing with loss and grief. She speaks to everyone’s experience with loss and grief being very individual.
Kristal – Drug Poisoning During Pandemic Stigma
Kristal discusses how the pandemic has created additional stigma surrounding those who use drugs. She dissuses how it seems like some losses are treated as more deserving of being mourned than others. Many people have had to grieve privately instead of publically within a community. She touches on the state of the public health system during the pandemic.
Grief Literacy and Developmental Disability
Grief literacy has become a popular topic, yet it is a topic that is untapped within the disability community, specifically within the developmental sector. The sector supports and empowers people with a developmental disability and consists of families, their loved ones and service providers.
Christian – Grieving spaces
Christian talks grieving spaces and people coming together when grieving
Caileigh – Wanting to fix a grieving child
Caileigh gives advice about the desire to fix, especially to parents who are grieving themselves as well as supporting children who are grieving.
Nicole – Power of Speaking About Lost Ones
Nicole discusses the importance of sharing memories of those lost to drug poisoning and speaking their names.
Christian – Denial and grieving
Christian discusses what happens after members of the community die from drug poisoning and how it’s OK for grief to be messy
Craig – How men process grief
Craig talks about his personal story of grief and how he learned to process his emotions in a healthy way. He discusses the challenges that men face when grieving, and offers advice on how to find healthy ways to cope with loss.Craig lost his wife, his mother, his job, and his home in a short period of time. He describes how he felt pressured to be stoic and strong for others, and how this made it difficult for him to grieve. He eventually realized that it was important to allow himself to feel his emotions, even the difficult ones.Craig shares some of the things that helped him to process his grief, such as talking to a therapist, writing in a journal, and spending time in nature. He also emphasizes the importance of finding support from friends and family. This video is a powerful and moving story of how one man found healing after experiencing a series of devastating losses. It is an important reminder that grief is a normal and healthy emotion, and that there are healthy ways to cope with it.
Kristal – Poetry, Comedy, & Art for Grieving
Kristal discusses using poetry and other forms of creative expression as a distraction from her grief and to disassociate in a safe and productive way. She discusses grief being love with nowhere to go, so she puts it into art.
Caileigh – Recommendations as a therapist and a griever
Caileigh discussed two recommendations for parents on how to support their child’s grief. as a therapist and a griever. The first is to recognize that being with is far more important than fixing. There’s two pieces to connection. The first being that one of the most important healing aspects to grief is feeling connected to others.
Christian – COVID amplified the inequities in society
Christian talks about those that have very little and how COVID amplified their difficulties
Kristal – Lack of Memorials During Pandemic
Kristal talks about how memorials can offer closure to people who are grieving, find a community, and share stories. With the absence of this during the pandemic, many people turned inward to grieve or isolated, which can create safety issues and have an impact on mental health. She speaks to how this leads to depression, physical pain, and it compounds upon itself.