Dr Lucy Hone has become a household name for her work on bereavement and resilience and now, she’s turning her focus on living losses: the non-bereavement losses like redundancy, climate change, infertility and more that affect so many of us. She talks to Capsule about her new work and the survey she’s hoping will change the game on our national mental health crisis.
If you have experienced the death of a loved one, you’ll know that the world is often immediately carved into two halves: before, and after. But while a bereavement is devastating, it’s not the only kind of life event that can knock your world off balance.
This is the more undefined genre of loss that Dr Lucy Hone, the co-director of the New Zealand Institute for Wellbeing and Resilience (NZIWR) is now exploring, combining the fields she has led for more than a decade.
For the first part of her career, Lucy worked mostly in resilience. And then in 2014, her 12-year-old daughter, Abi, was killed in a car accident, alongside family friends, and Lucy was pushed into the new world of bereavement. First, as a receiver. And then eventually, as a leader, writing the book Resilient Grieving and releasing an acclaimed TED talk that has now had over 5m views.
“Because of Abi dying, I started reading the bereavement literature and found it lacking,” she says. “Basically, the academic field that studied bereavement and the one that studied resilience hadn’t met. So I’ve spent the last decade taking the evidence-based tools and strategies from my field of resilience psychology, and applying them to the bereavement world.”
But after spending a decade in bereavement work, Lucy started getting the message that there was another area of emotional complexity that wasn’t being catered to.
People would come to the Institute’s Coping With Loss programmes looking for help in processing a parent’s dementia diagnosis or a relationship break-up. “It suddenly became apparent to me how few resources we had to offer them: our courses didn’t cater for non-death losses. We were always telling people, “there’s no hierarchy to grief,’ and here we were, turning people away, effectively putting a hierarchy on it.”
At the end of 2023, three things coincided at once: a friend asked for help after going through a redundancy, a neighbour wanted resources to support a friend’s shock divorce, and then an executive coaching colleague mentioned that a large part of their client work was dealing with undiagnosed grief. All three of these were big losses – but didn’t involve bereavement in the traditional sense.
This opened up a new way of thinking for Lucy and a new direction in her career – she has got a book deal with a global publisher to write about living losses; the life-altering events that affect so many of us. Redundancy, chronic illness, climate disaster, infertility, migration, a natural disaster, family estrangement, divorce or separation to name some examples. Experiences that aren’t a death but can feel like one – only without the socially understood playbook on how to talk about them.
As part of her work, Lucy has launched The Stressful Life Events Study, including a survey inviting people to discuss their own life-shaping event, aimed at gathering more information about how these experiences affect people in order to build more resources to help.
The survey has only been up a week, and already the response has been staggering, she says. There have been hundreds of responses so far from all over the world – she’s aiming for 1000 in total. Lucy believes the strong uptake is indicative of how many people are suffering. “They want to talk about hard stuff, but sadly they don’t often get the opportunity to,” she says. “So many people have said to me ‘thank you for giving me the chance to tell my story’.”
Through her research and new book, shining a light on these living losses, Lucy is hoping to help New Zealand’s much-reported mental health crisis.
“We know we have a mental illness crisis, but there is so little research into living losses that we have very little idea how many of those people are actually grieving a loss or significant transition of some kind,” she says.
“The Five Stages of Grief model is still the dominant one – but we now know that model is outdated and inaccurate, so by helping people understand and manage their grief associated with these non-death losses, I’m hoping we can reduce the mental health crisis on a global scale.”
The survey is open now and will run for a few weeks, so if you have lived through a stressful life event, Lucy recommends taking 7-10 minutes to fill it out if you want to add your own story and experience to the collective work. “That way, we can help provide better support for people going through stressful life experiences in the future.”
