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A A charity that helps people cope with the trauma of sudden deaths on the road is now also supporting those bereaved by the coronavirus, who are facing similar extreme shock and potential post-traumatic stress.
Social workers are assigned to around 200 families per month by Brake, using techniques that have also been perfected to help relatives of those killed in the Manchester Arena terrorist attack in 2017.
Brake’s Sudden service has been funded mostly by the Department of Health and Social Affairs and is due to end in March. But the charity is calling for extended funding as the latest wave of the virus takes the daily death toll to its highest level.
More than 100,000 people in the UK have died from Covid-19. The parallels to car crashes included sudden death and, in many cases, midlife, said Mary Williams, general manager of Brake.
“It’s about having your heart ripped out of your family in unexpected ways,” Williams said. “For example, we know road fatalities happen, but we don’t think it’s going to happen to us. We know that Covid deaths are happening but we don’t understand that it is going to happen to us. We have no experience of it because we are so disconnected from a sudden traumatic death that we are not equipped to deal with it.
Rachael Singleton, 43, from Belfast, used the service after her father, Tony, 71, died of coronavirus after being mistakenly admitted to a Covid ward during treatment for an unrelated infection. She couldn’t see him, the hospital forgot to call before he died, and then sent another man’s clothes home.
“Here we would normally have an alarm clock and dress him, but he was naked in a body bag,” she said. “It was hellish.”
The counseling helped her see that what she had experienced was trauma.
Those bereaved in the first wave spoke of the traumatic effect of the current news on the pandemic and the deaths, making it difficult to “get over” their grief.
Due to the latest wave, more bereaved people have joined support groups such as Covid-19 Bereaved Families for Justice in recent weeks. It has welcomed 660 new members since the end of November, bringing to nearly 2,300 members of its Facebook community. He calls for a national bereavement and bereavement support program.
“The need for help is enormous,” said activist and psychotherapist Kathryn of Prudhoe, whose father, Tony Clay, 60, died of Covid in April. “The list of new members this week was huge. We have people who come and say that they lost their loved one yesterday or even this morning. It’s just an attack. What we have now are people like me, nine months after the bereavement, supporting the new bereaved.
Of the deaths from Covid in the UK in the first week of January, 11% were in people under the age of 65. In the past year in England there have been over 76,000 more deaths than the five-year average.
The consequences of not coping with the shock of sudden death can include PTSD and the complex grief disorder, which leaves the grieving person unable to move, constantly brooding over their grief for months and years until they are be processed.
Brake deploys trauma experts who try to stabilize people and “normalize their reactions.”
“It helps to say that they don’t go crazy and that their reactions, whatever they are – vomiting, rocking, stammering – are normal and what they need is protection and safety,” said Williams.
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