Chris Johns

And I think the ones that don't want to know have all sorts of different reasons, perhaps unique reasons for not wanting to say the right thing, but really not to go anywhere near properly helping you.

And I'll explain, or I'll suggest what help can be given to people in that situation in a moment.

I think that

There must be lots of reasons why people do this sort of thing very badly.

Obviously, it's horrible talking about illness and death.

It's just ghastly.

There's nothing really very good to come out of it.

I think that if people are mildly depressed themselves or have other emotional stuff, turbulence going on, in the literature on depression, it's often remarked that there is data to suggest that if you have...

had an experience of depression or it's lurking somewhere on or just over your horizon, being near a depressed person can trigger it.

That's a known data based finding from the psychological literature.

So I think one of the reasons why people stay away from grieving people is that they don't want their own emotional turbulence, be it depression, be it their own grief about something else triggered.

It just might be, you know, it could be existential angst.

I think that one of the reasons why we have

changed the way we do this you mentioned since world war one i would say really since early mid-victorian times and i can speak about this in a british context because it was that that was the generation of of people that those early victorians that in this country at least first went through the death of god i call it or the or the loss of religion

The belief that God doesn't exist and therefore went on these various excursions into trying to find other ways to give life meaning.

A lot of people failed in that effort, not least the philosophy profession, I think.

But, you know, one of my heroes is an economist, John Maynard Keynes.

Most people will have heard of him and he was part of something called the Bloomsbury Group.

And they were explicit in their attempts to find life's meaning once they decided that God didn't exist.

And they had a philosopher, a guy called G.E.