It is well established that work impacts on people’s wellbeing. People often presume and create a separation between their work life and their private life.  However, life events like having a terminal diagnosis, which may be considered private, can impact a person’s work. In this article, we provide several tips for supporting people with a terminal illness in the workplace.

Sudden, brutal death; and so many deaths, at one time. What does it do to you to be one of the bereaved in such a traumatic event such as the 9/11 attacks or a pandemic like Covid-19?

How can we prepare for death while ageing? This article explores...

Erica Borgstrom, a medical anthropologist and lecturer at The Open University, explores why death from coronavirus is not the type of death we expect.

What would you do if you found out you had a terminal illness? Hear more from some of the people in 'A Time to Live' as they discuss their experiences of dealing with just that. 

We know drunk-driving causes death on the roads, but how does taking drugs like cannabis affect your driving skills? This album offers a chance to see how psychologists perform experiments which measure how much cannabis distorts a normal state of consciousness. Tracks 5-8 explore human inventiveness, pointing out that nothing in the world could have been made without the human capacity for imagination. Evolutionary anthropologists use the example of tool-making, showing that humans started to develop this brain capacity 50,000 years ago. Scientists can demonstrate that musicians and artists use an unusual amount of imagination for their creativity; and, lastly, the audio tracks 9-11 look at the complex topic of human consciousness. This material forms part of The Open University course DSE212 Exploring Psychology.

As a society, we're starting to look death in its hollow eyesockets and pull it into the light. But how scared do we remain of death - and is it healthy to have a bit of anxiety when staring into the great beyond? Jonathan Jong explores.

The concept of wellbeing is intended to be holistic and cover the entire life course and life events. However, when it comes to dying, wellbeing is usually not the first (or in top ten even) of words that people think about. People may be more familiar with thinking about ‘quality of life’, which if often linked to patient outcomes. In this article, we’ll outline what taking a wellbeing approach to dying matters and what it could look like.