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Psychle: Life Stages | Death
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DEATH

Death, the total cessation of life processes that eventually occurs in all living organisms. The state of human death has always been obscured by mystery and superstition, and its precise definition remains controversial, differing according to culture and legal systems.
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Death, the total cessation of life processes that eventually occurs in all living organisms. The state of human death has always been obscured by mystery and superstition, and its precise definition remains controversial, differing according to culture and legal systems.
The physical aging process often ends with the failure of several organs: the cardiovascular system collapses, the lungs and the brain fail. Death occurs. From a medical point of view, there are different types of death: "clinical death", in which the cardiovascular system fails, pulse and respiration stop, the organs are no longer supplied with oxygen and nutrients. In the case of a clinical death, however, cardiopulmonary resuscitation is still possible and often successful.
The American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross developed a five-stage model of the psychology of dying and grief. In her book titled On Death and Dying (1969), she proposed that in response to the awareness of their impending death, individuals move through stages of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Other authorities note that these stages do not occur in any predictable order, and feelings of hope, anguish, and terror may also be included in the range of emotions experienced.
What constitutes death? It is clear enough that people die when their lives end, but less clear what constitutes the ending of a person’s life. In what sense might death or posthumous events harm us? To answer this question, we will need to know what it is for something to be in our interests. What is the case for and the case against the harm thesis, the claim that death can harm the individual who dies, and the posthumous harm thesis, according to which events that occur after an individual dies can still harm that individual? How might we solve the timing puzzle? This puzzle is the problem of locating the time during which we incur harm for which death and posthumous events are responsible.
The concept of death is a key to human understanding of the phenomenon. There are many scientific approaches and various interpretations of the concept. Additionally, the advent of life-sustaining therapy and the numerous criteria for defining death from both a medical and legal standpoint, have made it difficult to create a single unifying definition. One of the challenges in defining death is in distinguishing it from life. As a point in time, death would seem to refer to the moment at which life ends. Determining when death has occurred is difficult, as cessation of life functions is often not simultaneous across organ systems. Such determination, therefore, requires drawing precise conceptual boundaries between life and death.
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