This physician discovered near-death experience science can help those experiencing grief.

photo by: Martin

Today we welcome Dr. Piero Calvi-Parisetti, an Italian-born, Scottish-raised MD who since 2004 has developed an intense, scholarly interest in evidence suggesting the survival of consciousness after death. He’s written some terrific books on the subject including 21 Days Into the Afterlife, a book that received quite a lot of positive attention. Recently Dr. Calvi-Parisetti has turned his attention to grief and bereavement–and that’s one of the things we want to talk to him a lot about today.

Alex Tsakiris: …you think there’s a scientific reason why this Near-Death Experience educational programs can be effective in helping people overcome grief and bereavement. You make the point that you get out of it what you put into it. And you say that’s not just a good axiom but there’s scientific evidence for the fact that if you work at this you’re likely to have results. But if you don’t work at it as much you’re less likely to have results.

Dr. Calvi-Parisetti: …that’s exactly what happens in cognitive therapy. If you don’t identify your wrong, distorted, excessively negative thoughts, and if you don’t work at correcting them, your moods don’t improve. On the other hand, we have research, particularly by Dr. Kenneth Ring which I found phenomenally interesting, and it’s fueled my enthusiasm for the approach I developed… we all know that NDE’ers show an array of beneficial psychological and behavioral changes after an NDE… what was extraordinary is that Ring showed some of these changes appeared in people who did not have an NDE but just read about it.

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Click here for Dr. Calvi-Parisetti’s website

Read Excerpts From Interview:

 

Dr. Calvi-Parisetti: Grief is the most universal human experience. Grieving and suffering after a loss is an absolutely universal experience. That’s one thing. The other thing is the approach is to take care of [things] that are normally on offer [that] research tells us are not effective–are not efficacious. The third point, and here comes a personal part of the equation because about 15 years ago I suffered from a bout of severe depression. I was living in the US at the time and I was frankly suicidal. What literally saved my life was cognitive behavioral therapy. It’s important to point this out because what CBT taught me about saving my life is that the way we feel depends entirely on the way we think. Our moods are dependent on our thoughts. Now you can put one and one together–or two and two together. If you’re a bereaved person and you think your loved one has disappeared, vaporized, has completely vanished into some sort of black nothingness, the resulting mood is severe grief [and] depression. If you think that in some way we don’t understand [...