Transforming Grief

Reflections, educational resources, and an opportunity to submit artwork
that centers political, community-based, non-medical approaches for tending to grief

IDHA Statement on the Medicalization of Grief

In March 2022, the DSM-5 announced the decision to add "prolonged grief disorder" as a mental health diagnosis, pathologizing experiences of grief that lasts longer than a year. At IDHA, we believe in moving beyond medicalizing frameworks, into understanding the complex individual, collective, and socio-economic layers to our grief.

Grief manifests in many forms of lived experience, and necessitates an expansiveness toward how we tend to ourselves. We honor that grief is a human experience. We honor how much loss has occurred as a result of the pandemic in the last two years, the grief we have experienced throughout the duration of our lives, as well as the grief within our lineages and ancestries. We honor the immense losses from experiences of colonization, incarceration, and oppression. We wish to complicate and push back on the idea that these experiences be labeled “disorders” or “illness”, and offer multiple approaches to the topic of grief.

Our response spans a list of community-sourced resources on the topic of grief, a self-paced course on grief and embodiment, and an open call to create art about grief.

Events and Trainings

• Upcoming or ongoing

  • Grief Relief - online workshops with BACII

  • YU:EXIST: A Symbolic Death + Rebirth Journey - an empowering 4-week experience designed to re-engage you to your life and to our shared world. Through learnings, practices, self-reflection and community gatherings, you’ll receive invaluable insights and awareness while making new connections and discoveries about your life. This can serve as a pathway to better understand, accept, heal, and prepare for the end-of-life. 

  • Black Folks Grieve - online workshops with The Glorious Hun

  1. Past

     • Grief Stewardship - online workshop on Dice Berlin (March 26, 2022)

     • Grief Circle: Fire Ceremony - in person event with Healing Justice London (March 30, 2022)

• Moving Grief - Moving Loss

Grief, Collectivity, and Oppression

• Grief Belongs in Social Movements, Can We Embrace It?

• Medicine Stories (Aurora Levins Morales)

• Archetypal Grief: Slavery’s Legacy of Intergenerational Child Loss (Fanny Brewster)

• Handbook of Social Justice in Loss and Grief: Exploring Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (edited by Edited By Darcy L. Harris, Tashel C. Bordere)

• Grieving While Black: An Antiracist Take on Oppression and Sorrow (Breeshia Wade)

Grief, Ritual, and Transformation

• The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise (Martín Prechtel)

• Healing the Soul Wound (Eduardo Duran)

• Ritual: Power, Healing, and Community (Malidoma Patrice Somé)

• Of Water and Spirit (Malidoma Patrice Somé)

• Kindling: Writings on the Body (Aurora Levins Morales)

• The Stages of Death (Lana Smithner) 

Resources for Tending to Grief

• The GEN Grief Toolkit (Global Environments Network)

• How Magic Helps Me Live With Pain And Trauma (Maranda Elizabeth) 

• The Orphaned Adult: Understanding and Coping with Grief and Change After the Death of Our Parents (Alexander Levy)

• Saying Hello Again When We Have Lost Someone We Love (Chapter from Retelling the Stories of Our Lives by David Denborough)

• It’s OK That You’re Not OK (Megan Devine)

• The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief (Francis Weller)

Resources for Supporting Others

• How not to say the wrong thing (Los Angeles Times)

Writing and Art

• A Grief Observed (C.S. Lewis)

• The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)

This list is being updated on an ongoing basis. Please email us at contact@idha-nyc.org if you have recommended resources for us to add.

In partnership with The Justice Arts Coalition (JAC), IDHA invites our community to create artwork demonstrating the myriad shapes that grief can take, as well as the many ways that we can tend to our grief. 

This project centers the power of creativity to make meaning from and heal through grief, in contrast with medicalized approaches. We invite our wider communities to share experiences of grief through art, in any medium that best captures each individual’s experiences. By collecting art around this central theme, our hope is to transmute our collective grief into new narratives that celebrate the power of mutual support and community action. We are launching this project at the two-year mark of COVID-19 with recognition of the ways in which the pandemic has shaped and amplified so much grief, but the project is open to all experiences.

While all are invited to submit original work to this project, JAC and IDHA particularly seek to uplift the voices and experiences of those currently or formerly incarcerated in institutions. This includes, but is not limited to, those held in jails, prisons, psychiatric facilities, nursing homes, and group homes. JAC will coordinate the inclusion of works from incarcerated artists, and IDHA will coordinate the inclusion of works by psychiatric and trauma survivors. We are interested in bridging dialogue about these experiences with other members of our community including activists, artists, family members, advocates, and mental health providers.

The call opens on Friday, March 25, 2022. The deadline to submit artwork is Friday, May 20, 2022.