Thank you.
First I want to say that I was delighted to see this motion going through and that we're moving forward with providing better support for bereaved families.
What I will speaking to today will be based on my doctoral research that I did as part of a Ph.D. in research and intervention in clinical psychology. I will also be speaking from my perspective as a psychologist and also as a bereaved sibling who was raised by two bereaved parents.
In my doctoral research, I interviewed 21 parents. I also interviewed seven health care professionals who provide bereavement support services to those parents and to parents in general. I have given the information to the committee in my speaker notes on where to find the peer-reviewed article that contains the results of that research and also my thesis, which puts the research into a broader context.
I'll move on to my key points for today.
I wholeheartedly agree with the comments made by the other witnesses. What I saw in the research that I did on the experiences of bereaved parents in the first year post-loss, and of parents reflecting back to that time one to five years post-loss, was that grief does not follow a timeline. We can't expect parents to have intense grief right after the loss and then be fine afterwards. We have to also understand that even years after the loss of their child—the death of their child—anniversaries and other difficult times of year can trigger parents to have, again, intense forms of grief.
I also want to say that the subject of my research was not focused on employment. I was very much focused on their experiences and their perspectives on the services provided to them. However, despite that, there were still some comments made about employers and employment. Parents had mixed views on how their employers understood what was going on with them. Some employers were understanding, others were less so.
Parents also spoke about returning to work. For some, it was a benefit. They wanted to keep busy. They wanted to get back to life. For others, it was too emotionally difficult and draining, and they also mentioned just not feeling ready.
Parents also mentioned again these intense emotions of grief returning around anniversaries and different times of the year. The grief resulting from the death of a child stays with parents for a lifetime. The intensity of the grief may change over time, but it can be reactivated for various reasons.
I also looked at the support that bereaved families receive. Many parents do fare well with little support because they feel well supported by their social networks, by their families, by different things that they already have in place. When I spoke to parents who felt that they did need support, they often felt that it was limited by the number of sessions provided, for example, by a social worker. Here in Quebec they receive 20 sessions.
Also, lack of expertise by professionals in the public sector was noted as problematic and unhelpful.
On a side note to that, I would just like to draw attention to the employee assistance program website, which I looked at the other day. To be honest, I was disappointed to read this statement from the grief section:
Grieving is an experience of detachment and affective disinvesting which leads a person to a new adaptation.
That was far from the experience of the parents whom I interviewed. There is no detachment. There is a reattachment. There is a change—now I'm speaking from the perspective of a psychologist—from attachment to a child that is physically living to attachment to a child that no longer is alive, but it's still an attachment. There is no detachment. There is no letting go. That dates back to previous grief theories that, based on research such as mine, we no longer hold to be valid.
To summarize, in my opinion employers should be willing to give parents leave following the death of their child, but parents should not be obligated to take this leave. It has to remain flexible.
For example, a parent may return to work, thinking it will be helpful, and then become overwhelmed or experience an episode of depression. The parent should be able to take leave at that time. Employers should treat parents with dignity and respect, and we should all understand the language of grief.
Parents should also be allowed to leave around the time of the anniversary of the death or on their child's birthday. In this regard, the parents I interviewed were very clear on what times of year were particularly difficult for them, so that is something that could most likely be pre-established.
In this same regard, bereavement support services should be flexible, consistent, and conducted by professionals with a clear understanding of how to support bereaved parents.
Once again, I just want to thank the committee for putting this motion forward. I hope that it continues to grow and that we continue to better support these families.
Thank you.