Thread by @doctor_oxford

🧵 A note on complex grief and that partygate video:

Complex or complicated grief is characterised as being in an ongoing, heightened state of mourning that prevents you from healing.

A crippling sense of loss or other severe & unpleasant emotions endure & prevent recovery.

A person’s ability to function normally can be severely impaired, and for many months or years.

You may feel numb, angry, bitter, unable to focus on anything but the death of your loved one. You may suffer from hopelessness, depression or feel that life is not worth living.

There are many causes of complex grief such as how the person died (suddenly, traumatically), prior family conflicts or when the person who died was a child.

One key factor can be the thought that the death was avoidable, that it could have been prevented.

Another may be anger caused by the feeling that the death had been belittled, dismissed, laughed at or diminished.

This, for me, is the crux of why #partygate matters. In this video, for example, revellers are literally laughing at rules designed to minimise Covid deaths.

They are also, by implication, mocking all of us who obeyed the rules. Those who grieved alone. Suffered alone. Died alone. Did their obedient and decent best - alone.

These parties, their cover up, & @RishiSunak’s complicity in ennobling @BorisJohnson’s favourite partygoers…

… insult the dead, the bereaved, the traumatised, the suffering.

And the sheer fact that the partygoers have been able to act with impunity - one of them literally being rewarded with a lifetime seat in the Lords - is understandably making people burn with anger.

Because for so many, their grief was already complicated. The deaths sudden, traumatic, potentially avoidable. And superseded by an endless stream of photos & videos rubbing salt into wounds.

Where does anger go when there is no accountability?

How does someone “move on”?