Session 6: Anxiety and Fear

8th Global Conference

Monday 4th May – Thursday 7th May 2009
Budapest, Hungary

Increasing Death Anxiety and the Unintended Costs of Managed Care in the U.S.: Newly Emerging ‘Taproots’ of the ‘War on Terror’
Nate Hinerman
Health Services/Theology and Religious Studies, University of San Francisco, USA

In the U.S., life expectancy continues to increase, which means Americans are living longer. The primary causes of death are slow, progressive illnesses rather than acute infectious diseases. Both of these epidemiological transitions have pushed end-of-life care from the home to the hospital, in part so that the dying can be proximate to important life-extending technologies. Resulting from these transitions, caregiving at the end-of-life has been assigned to medical professionals, rather than friends and family. The impact of this migration has caused the average person in the U.S. to have an increasingly passive role in caring for the dying. A challenge has arisen surrounding how to explore spiritual issues (i.e. questions of meaning, questions of value, and questions of relationship) with the dying when the context of care they are receiving is almost purely geared towards the biological dimension of their personhood. Augmenting “American individualism” and a privileging of patient autonomy within our health care systems, our increasingly passive role in providing care to the dying leaves, for many, few opportunities to reflect on and consider carefully one’s own mortality. In fact, a common American perception is emerging that sees death as a “medical failure,” and not as a natural process. An unintended cost of this growing passivity in caregiving for and decreased exposure to the dying has been an increase in Americans’ death anxiety (i.e. fear of death).

After surveying the main influences currently affecting our familiarity with death in the U.S., this paper examines the relationship between changing attitudes about death in the U.S. with recent research from Terror Management Theory (TMT). TMT is a burgeoning field within psychology, and recently-conducted empirical research supports many of its core tenants. The common thesis in these studies suggests that when people are confronted with or reminded about death, the test subjects tend to demonstrate aggressive behavior towards those perceived as different and positively towards those perceived as similar. Test subjects also tend to exhibit both intolerant and aggressive behavior towards those perceived to support immortality ideologies different from the test subject’s own. One implication from this research posits that increases in our individual and collective death anxieties often render us more inclined to exhibit intolerant beliefs, attitudes, and actions towards those perceived or labeled as “different.” Such intolerance commonly advances in four stages: dismissal, assimilation, accommodation, and if these fail, annihilation. This paper offers a deep analysis of American death anxiety through the lens of managed care for the dying, as a means of elucidating possible socio-religious taproots that may ultimately contribute to the rise of intolerance and violence increasing in American society.

‘Don’t tase me, bro’: Taser-related Deaths as Risk Society’ Accidents?
Temitope Oriola
Department of Sociology, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

Drawing on the conception of risk, anxiety and reflexivity in contemporary Western societies , this paper interrogates widely-publicized fatalities as a result of the use of electro-muscular disruption technology, specifically the taser by the police in Canada. Through a close reading of two newspapers with national appeal and multi-layered analysis of secondary sources, such as reports of commissions of inquiries, studies and press releases by human rights groups and promotional cum justification materials from the manufacturers of the taser, the deaths of 20 persons through the use of the taser are analyzed as ‘accidents’ of ‘mega-technology’. This paper investigates the development of the taser as a tool for the management of anxieties of late modernity and explicates the discourses of imminent and immanent threat and social insecurity promoted by producers of the taser and law enforcement which both necessitated and legitimated its adoption. The taser-related death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski is used to enunciate how a concomitant albeit unforeseen ‘crisis of legitimacy’ has occurred for law enforcement institutions, particularly the police and how the latter became constructed as folk devils, thus effectively carrying the proverbial ‘hot potatoes’.