Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (1926-2004) remains one of the most influential American psychiatrists of the twentieth century. Her “five stages of grief” model– alternately called the “Kübler-Ross model”– is still widely used, and has gained a good deal of cultural currency. This model was originally laid out in her groundbreaking work, On Death and Dying, written in 1969 and based on her experiences working with patients dying of terminal illness. She identified five “stages” the patients tended to go through when dealing with their imminent mortality: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Today, even people completely unfamiliar with the field of psychiatry could rattle off those five stages. But like most works of scientific and scholarly importance, it’s worth questioning: is this model still relevant? Many experts today largely disavow the five stages model, not because the emotions it describes are inaccurate, but rather because understanding grief as a series of discrete stages is limiting. Numerous “counter-models” have been proposed; essentially, however, the common consensus is that not everyone will experience grief as a linear progression through different stages.

Today’s thinking on grief instead emphasizes the uniqueness of individual experience. Grief can be chaotic; people can experience anger simultaneously with denial or sadness; a seeming “acceptance” may be followed by a “relapse” into an earlier stage. None of this is strange or unhealthy, according to grief counselors and experts

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