Saper accompagnare. Una proposta formativa per ripensare la morte in prospettiva antropologica

Facing the topic of death is an hard challenge for anyone, everywhere and in every historical time. Supporting people looking at their own end it’s even harder today: social scientists as- sert that we are experiencing the crises of the death culture, which is responsible for the contemporary elabora-tion of the end of life. De- ath is a taboo and this condition provokes a cul- tural lack: we don’t know how to manage dying people, seniors or terminal patients, as well as their suffering relatives. People working in this environment are expo- sed to stress and serious psychological diffi- culties; one of the reason is because they do not have appropriate cultural tools in order to face death. During December 2014 and April 2015, I led a workshops in order to make participants awa- re of the taboo of death in contemporary Italian culture, using an informal and participatory me- thodolo-gy. My objectives were to foster constructive discussions and to create tools aiming to help partici-pants in their daily activity of terminal patients’ care. Thanks to this wor- kshop, participants called into question past as- sumptions and re-thought death in order to sup- port their daily activity in termi-nal patients’ care, building-up a common knowledge ready to be used. Even if this experience have been only the first step of a life long education pro- cess, it restored self-confidence and it di- smantled the sense of isolation. The workshop could be proposed to other pro- fessionals involved in terminal patients’ care, in order to offer cultural tools able to help he- alth worker daily facing death and sensible peo- ple wishing to empower the inter-disciplinary dialogue with medical anthropology.