FREEDOM FROM DEATH ANXIETY

Our culture encourages denial about death. While we don't talk about it, death anxiety is a pervasive theme of being human, shaping much of what we think and do. Coming to terms with our mortality can only help us.

- Words By Linda Moon

We first become aware of death's universality, irreversibility and inevitability between the ages of three and nine. This terrifying discovery comes to us in gradual stages, says Professor Ross Menzies, a mental health author, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Technology, Sydney and practising clinical psychologist. From then on, we live our existence under the fearful spectre of death, he says, a bitter knowledge that's the source of much (mostly subconscious and repressed) distress.

What's less understood is how fear of death shapes human wellbeing, behaviour and society. This revelation is the crux of a groundbreaking book, Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society, coauthored by Menzies and daughter Dr Rachel Menzies (also an acclaimed psychologist). Death, they write, is the “worm at the core of the human psyche, nibbling away at our sense of security”.

Professor Menzies has been treating people with anxiety-related and mood disorders for more than 30 years and has become a leading expert in the field of death anxiety. “To some extent it's present in all of us,” he says. “It's one of the great curses of being human.”

The human curse

All biological life perishes. But humans are doubly cursed by our awareness of death. It’s our intelligence and capacity for reflective consciousness that’s to blame, allowing us to contemplate the future, where, inevitably, as the duo write in Mortals, “all paths are leading — to the grave”.