ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the cultural issues related to counselling, death, and bereavement. Modern science, aided by medical research, has raised serious questions concerning when it is legitimate to define death. The lure of immortality has persuaded several persons to volunteer their bodies to the cryonicists. Briefly, the life-span theory of growth and development suggests that human development involves simultaneous growth and decline throughout life that is from conception to death. Morison offers that death is no more a single, clearly delimited, momentary phenomena than is infancy, adolescence, or middle-age. The spectacular advances in the medical sciences have raised hopes in people of longevity and immortality. When one turns to non-Western cultures one learns that neither children nor adults are prevented from witnessing a dead body. The task of the counsellor involved in cognitive therapy would be to help the person modify inaccurate and dysfunctional thinking and therefore become less emotionally disturbed.
