Speakers

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Lauren Breen PhD FT is a psychologist, researcher, TEDx speaker, and a professor of psychology at Curtin University, Australia. She works to understand the psychology of grief and loss over the lifespan and the intersections with mental health and wellbeing. She has published 180 journal articles, 22 book chapters, and co-edited 1 book, The Routledge International Handbook of Child and Adolescent Grief in Contemporary Contexts. She was managing editor of Death Studies for 4 years, a board member for Grief Australia for 9 years, and currently is a board member for Lionheart Camp for Kids, an organisation supporting grieving children and families. In harnessing strong partnerships, Lauren’s research has informed policy and practice locally and around the world. In 2022, she received the Research Award from the Association for Death Education and Counseling (USA). In 2023 and 2024, she was recognised as Australia’s top researcher in the category Hospice and Palliative Care. She is member of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement and is a Fellow of the Australian Psychological Society.

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Professor Kate Woodthorpe is a sociologist at the University of Bath where she co-directs the world leading research center, the Center for Death and Society (CDAS). Over two decades Kate has published and conducted funded research on funeral practices and costs, families at the end of life, and the deathcare sector. Her latest work is on family disputes, dying at home, and death administration.

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Dr Nina Vaswani is the Senior Research Fellow at the Children and Young People’s Centre for Justice at the University of Strathclyde.   Nina’s key research interests are the experience and impact of loss, bereavement and trauma in young people and how these experiences interface and influence contact with the justice system, and her PhD focused on the bereavement experiences of boys and young men in prison.  Nina is also interested in young masculinities and how marginalisation, disadvantage, loss and trauma might shape young men’s developing identities, mental health, behaviours and outcomes. Nina was the PI on the Men Minds Project (www.menminds.org), which was coproduced with young men aged 16-24 to better understand marginalised young men’s mental health, and she is currently PI on the Challenging Justice Inequalities project (www.challengejustice.org).

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Inês Rothes was born in Porto and has been a psychologist since 1999, having graduated from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of the University of Porto (FPCEUP). Throughout her professional and academic career, she has specialised in suicidology and suicide prevention, developing research, training, and clinical and community intervention in this field. She is currently the President of the Portuguese Society of Suicidology and a member of the suicide prevention working group of the National Coordination for Mental Health Policies (Ministry of Health).

She began her clinical practice in the field of drug addiction and is a specialist in Health and Community Psychology recognised by the Portuguese Psychologists’ Association. She has worked on various community and public mental health projects while maintaining clinical activity, mainly with young people and adults. She holds a Master’s degree in Psychological Intervention with Children and Adolescents and a PhD in Psychology from the University of Porto, with a European Doctorate title, having completed an international research internship at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Leuven in Belgium. She is currently an Assistant Professor at FPCEUP and a researcher at the Psychology Research Centre of the University of Porto (CPUP).

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Alison is Director of the Childhood Bereavement Network, the hub for those working with bereaved children and young people across the UK. She is also Coordinator of the National Bereavement Alliance, a strategic collaboration of organisations and individuals working with bereaved people in England. She keeps the sector updated with relevant developments, and helps the field to develop consensus on key policy and practice topics, contributing to gains in national policy in bereaved people’s interests. She was awarded an MBE for her work in 2021. Alison has a particular interest in the social and policy influences on bereavement, and in supporting bereavement services to demonstrate the effectiveness of their work. She is a member of the International Work Group on Death, Dying and Bereavement.

Opening Statement

Any work that helps us to understand grief better, and to get the right support to the right people at the right time, is to be welcomed. In an effort to understand and address ‘Level 3’ type needs, an immense and growing body of research and practice has contributed to our understanding of the collection of reactions and symptoms defined as Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD). This explores risk factors, maintenance mechanisms and different manifestations across the life course: from children whose experiences are mediated so closely by their caregivers, to older adults facing life alone for the first time in many decades. It is also building an important evidence base around treatment approaches.

However, across health and social challenges, treatments are more straightforward to evaluate than preventative approaches, and so can dominate research and policy-making. The public health model reminds us to maintain a focus on all levels and types of support.

The public health model also prompts us to look beyond the individual, psychological challenges of grief. We need to pay as much attention to understanding and tackling the social and structural challenges that create complexity and unnecessary suffering in bereavement. These include housing policies that uproot bereaved people from their homes; social security that fails to protect families from the loss of an income; bullying of bereaved children that affects their ability to attend and thrive at school; racism that curtails cultural expressions of grief and inhibits people from seeking help.

These living conditions and contexts contribute to acute, ‘Level 3’ type challenges for bereaved people across the life course, and deserve research and policy investment. The public health model is a powerful tool to broaden the focus from the individual’s grief response, and consider what actions we can take as friends, neighbours, employers, educators, health systems and policy-makers to address these wider factors.

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Clare Killikelly is a clinical psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Zurich specialising in grief across cultural contexts, with a particular focus on prolonged grief disorder and global mental health. Her work examines how cultural meanings, social practices, and structural factors shape the experience, expression, and assessment of grief, and how these insights can be translated into effective, culturally responsive and scalable interventions.

A central strand of her research focuses on the development and evaluation of digital mental health interventions for grief, including internet- and app-based therapies designed to improve access to evidence-based care for underserved and hard-to-reach populations. She works at the intersection of clinical science, cultural psychology, and digital innovation, with a strong emphasis on ethical and scalable care.

Clare has authored over 60 peer-reviewed publications and collaborates widely in international and interdisciplinary research networks advancing culturally informed grief care.

Opening Statement

Grief unfolds within a fundamentally social and cultural context. The loss of a close other—with strong attachment—disrupts not only emotional bonds but also our sense of identity, continuity, and belonging. In this way, grief reaches into a deep, almost cavernous layer of human experience. It reflects something essential about who we are as social beings. One might argue that grief is the apex human emotion: profound, relational, and existential. Yet, how grief is experienced, expressed, and understood is never truly universal—it is shaped and molded by culture.

The public health model of bereavement care offers a valuable framework to situate these variations. At its foundation, most people navigate grief with support from family, community, and cultural rituals. A smaller proportion may require structured, community-based interventions, while a minority experience persistent and impairing grief responses, now conceptualized as Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD), requiring specialist care. Importantly, each tier is embedded within cultural affordances—norms, practices, and meanings that enable or constrain how grief is lived and supported.

Psychiatry itself is not culturally neutral. Its diagnostic systems have evolved alongside shifting societal norms and understandings of distress. The emergence of PGD reflects a contemporary moment in this ongoing history—a cultural and clinical effort to define the boundaries between adaptive and maladaptive grief. As such, PGD must be understood not only as an individual disorder but as part of a broader cultural narrative about suffering, care, and legitimacy.

Integrating cultural sensitivity into the tiered model is therefore essential, ensuring bereavement care remains both scientifically grounded and socially responsive.

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João Salgado is a psychotherapist with a PhD in Clinical Psychology from the University of Minho and serves as Assistant Professor at UMAIA – Maia University, where he coordinates the Psychotherapy Research Laboratory and the PhD program in Clinical Psychology. He teaches courses on emotion-focused therapy and narrative and dialogical approaches in clinical psychology within that program.

He represents Portugal on the European Federation of Psychologists' Associations (EFPA) working group on e-health, represents the Portuguese Psychologists' Association (Ordem dos Psicólogos Portugueses) at the National Telehealth Center, and is a member of the Association's e-health working group. Throughout his career, he has also provided clinical support to individuals experiencing grief.

Opening Statement

Level 3 is the point where emotion regulation, often sufficient at Levels 0 to 2, no longer works, because the emotion itself is blocked and needs transforming rather than supporting. From an Emotion-Focused Therapy standpoint, what distinguishes Level 3 is not how much suffering a person reports, but whether their primary grief emotion (sadness, longing, the pain of a broken bond) has been obstructed by secondary processes such as self-criticism, avoidance, or unresolved business with the deceased. This gives earlier levels a practical marker: not "how much pain," but "is this grief moving, or stuck." The relationship also runs the other way: what Level 3 teaches about self-criticism interrupting grieving can inform community gatekeepers, who need enough emotional literacy to notice when grief has stalled, without doing therapy themselves.
I want also to highlight how culture shapes the repertoire of emotional positions a person is permitted to occupy in grief. Grief reorganizes the self into specific social positions, and culture shapes which can be spoken aloud. This has clinical consequences: EFT grief work cannot be applied identically everywhere; some contexts invite explicit dialogue with the deceased, others require indirect, embodied, or ritual-mediated forms.
Across the life course, the mechanism stays constant (transforming blocked into adaptive emotion through lived experience) but its vehicle shifts: play and co-regulation with children, meaning-making and integration of loss with older adults. Level 3 is where public health, culture, and development converge on one question: what emotion has this person still not felt through?

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Maja O’Connor is a professor in clinical psychology at Department of Psychology, Aarhus University, Denmark, where she since 2017 has managed Unit for Bereavement Research. She is employed part time at The Danish National Center for Grief as a senior researcher. She has worked with bereavement research for over 25 years with a special focus on complicated grief reactions and has published more than 80 peer reviewed research papers and book chapters. She is an authorized clinical psychologist and formally qualified specialist in geriatric psychology. Her main research interest is the transition from adaptive grief to complicated, treatment-demanding grief reactions and how to identify and treat Prolonged Grief Disorder in adults.

Opening Statement

The death of significant others is one of the most distressing experiences in most people’s lives. Still, most bereaved people adapt to the loss as the emotional pain gradually declines and the loss becomes an integrated part of subjective history and identity. 

For some, probably around one in ten of the adult bereaved population, this adaptive grief process does not unfold. Instead, the bereaved person appears stuck in acute grief which becomes prolonged, painful, and impairing in a way that is related to long-term functional decline. Complicated grief reactions include Prolonged Grief Disorder (PGD) as well as bereavement-related PTSD and depression. Evidence based screening methods are available, and especially grief focused cognitive behavioral therapy has been found effective for reducing complicated grief reactions. In other words, we can identify and treat complicated grief effectively given the needed foundation to do so.

The public health model of bereavement care offers an important structure to identify people in need of treatment. At level 0 and 1, information about adaptive and complicated grief reactions and effective ways of screening and treatment can be relevantly shared to inform the greater public and to professionals and bereaved people. This may prevent marginalization and support efficient referral to treatment when needed. Level 2 includes more targeted help for bereaved people with a need for such. Here, knowledge of complicated grief reactions and how to screen for such is essential to ensure that people in need of specialized treatment are identified and referred to treatment at Level 3.