Feelings and words to say it. an experience of death education with teenagers in Brescia

Each individual is called by nature to come into contact with the end; this inevitable bond has always brought people to put in place a series of collective attitudes and behaviors in order to act before death. In contemporary society human being, taken from the hustle and bustle of work and constantly engaged in pursuing material well-being, doesn’t take time to think about death. Not only he personally distances himself from death but he also doesn’t even want to hear about it. But even if confined and avoided, death rises everywhere and always shows itself in all its dramatic relentlessness. Contemporary society is inclined towards a purely rational thought which tries to give an explanation to everything around us and rejects the possibility of not being able to have an answer to all the questions. In this context death becomes a taboo. The life-death dichotomy that characterizes the Western way of thinking inspires fear and worsens anxiety for an event which undeniably will hit everyone. This climate doesn’t help people. Especially in adolescence it is difficult to accept the death of the Other as a possible condition and it is rather seen as something to dismiss from our minds. Denouncing this taboo means to give breath to pain, to give it a meaning and to allow adolescents not only to express their fears, but also to give voice to their ability to go trough life. This experimental research is aimed at teenagers attending different high schools in the city of Brescia. The TDRS scale (Testoni Death Representation Scale) was used to assess the representation of death, the presence of alexithymia was investigated with the TAS-20, the Collett-Lester fear of death was used to detect anxiety that emerges in relation to the thought of death and finally the WHOQOL-SRPB questionnaire was used to investigate the satisfaction of quality of life in relation to the presence of a spiritual dimension. In order to obtain informations to confirm the quantitative data, it was decided to carry out a qualitative analysis through the Atlas.ti software, analyzing the material produced by the teenagers during the Death Education path and a final question in which they had to express what it meant for them. The sample consists of 315 students between 16 and 19 years old, divided into experimental (143) and control group (172). The obtained data indicate that a path of Death Education is useful to act on death representation directing it towards a vision of transition, while the qualitative analysis shows greater awareness on the theme of death and loss. In addition, a similar educational path has been proved effective to decrease anxiety that emerges in relation to the theme of Finiteness and at the same time it improved the difficulty of identifying and describing emotions as well as of communicating them to others. These data are confirmed by qualitative analysis which shows that at the beginning of the path the emotions expressed were mainly negative, towards the conclusion there was a prevalence of positive emotions. Emotional activation, within this context, shows itself in a variety of facets that are in a continuum where on one hand there are anger and pain and, on the other, there are hope and joy. With regard to spirituality an increase of hope, which affects the perception of their quality of life, is detected. These data support the conclusion that an intervention of Death Education is effective and important because it encourages reflections on death, but also on life and its value. Moreover it allows people to express their feelings and fears, putting them in a frame of meaning. In addition Death Education encourages every person to increase his own spiritual dimension which helps to take awareness on what it means to live knowing that we will die. Creating a context in which it is possible to speak of death allows people to become aware about the finiteness of life, giving them the means to face the fear of death, fear that is listened to, accepted and reworked.