Women's experience towards perinatal grief: a psychodynamic understanding

This study aimed to describe perinatal grief. Therefore, it outlined specific objectives to investigate the assistance offered by the health team, identify how this assistance influences the elaboration of perinatal grief and understand at what stage of grief, according to the Kübler-Ross theory, the mothers were in. The method used was qualitative-descriptive, its samples were made up of four mothers, two who were submitted to a support experience as informed by the perinatal grief assistance materials and two who were not. The selected instruments for the data collection were the semi-directed interview and the Family Design with Story Procedure (DF-E), that were analyzed according to the psychodynamic theory. As a result, it was observed that the support from the health teams favors the elaboration of grief. Which leads to the conclusion that there is a need for the development of studies to investigate the topic and for the creation of perinatal grief protocols in order to provide the best training for health teams.