When someone has lost his or her partner, feelings of grief are normal and usually diminish over time. However, for some people, strong feelings of grief persist. For coping with grief, it is important to learn to accept the loss, experience the pain of grief, adjust to an environment without the deceased person, and withdraw emotional energy and focus it on other relationships. Loss-oriented tasks, such as grief work, and restoration-oriented tasks, such as attending to life changes, engaging in new activities and finding new roles and identities, are both essential. The program is designed to be completed in 10 weeks and recommends that mourners complete one module or topic a week. To examine the benefits of SOLENA, this study will compare the answers of mourners that completed the intervention with the mourners of the control group, which will wait to complete the intervention. The group that completed the intervention is divided in two sub-groups. One group of mourners will complete the intervention in a fixed order, while the other will complete it in a self-tailored order according to their own needs at each moment. Specifically, the study examines how well the self-help program reduces grief, depression symptoms, and loneliness and examines whether the topics of the study modules are presented in a given order or whether participants can work on the topics according to their current needs makes a difference. Ultimately, it is expected that the self-tailored version leads to more benefits than completing SOLENA's modules in a fixed order.
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AI-rewrites the medical criteria so a patient or caregiver can understand them. Always confirm with the trial site.
Grief: Texas Revised Inventory of Grief - German Version
Timeframe: At week 10 (post-intervention)