 Media constructions of dying alone: a form of 'bad death'Clive Seale Social Science & Medicine, 2004, vol. 58, issue 5, 967-974 Abstract: In this study, newspaper accounts of people who die alone are analysed, drawing on a sample of 90 articles in the anglophone press that appeared in October 1999. Dying alone is represented as a fearful fate and a moral affair, often being the outcome of an undesirable personal character, either of the deceased or of onlookers, or involving the failings of society at large. It is frequently portrayed as occurring to people who are either geographically or socially distant from 'home', so that an imagined community of readers is encouraged to contemplate a death alone as the consequence of personal or societal breakdown. A degree of stigmatisation, sometimes of those who die alone, sometimes of those perceived to have caused this event, was evident. The negative evaluation of death alone parallels that found in some traditional societies where a death far from home is considered 'bad'. Dying alone contrasts significantly with the sociable, 'good', confessional deaths of newspaper columnists and other media celebrities facing terminal illness. Keywords: Death; Media; Social; construction; Elderly; Loneliness (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:socmed:v:58:y:2004:i:5:p:967-974 Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from Access Statistics for this article Social Science & Medicine is currently edited by Ichiro (I.) Kawachi and S.V. (S.V.) Subramanian More articles in Social Science & Medicine from Elsevier |
Is your work missing from RePEc? Here is how to contribute.
Questions or problems? Check the EconPapers FAQ or send mail to .
EconPapers is hosted by the
School of Business at Örebro University.