How Mindfulness Can Help People with Voice Disorders Cope with Grief and Loss

People with voice disorders often experience feelings of grief and loss around their vocal limitations. If they need to ration their voice use, they may experience social isolation as well as loss of professional and personal identity, income, and career.

Mindfulness for Grief and Loss

Mindfulness can help us cope with grief and loss. The focus on present moment acceptance allows us to fully feel our emotions, which helps us move through them instead of staying stuck in them. Additionally, mindfulness encourages reappraisal, a process by which we reframe the meaning of adverse events to alter their emotional impact (Ford, 2017).

The Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction curriculum, which inspired my 8-week course, was designed specifically for people with chronic health conditions. Mindfulness courses have been shown to be effective for reducing stress (Keng, 2011) and helping patients manage chronic pain (Lin, 2022), loneliness (Cresswell, 2012), grief related to illness (Tacón, 2011), and medically unexplained symptoms (Billiones, 2020).

The group format of a mindfulness class provides participants with a sense of community, as they learn to practice mindfulness together.

REFERENCES

Creswell JD, Irwin MR, Burklund LJ, et al. Mindfulness-based stress reduction training reduces loneliness and pro-inflammatory gene expression in older adults: a small randomized controlled trial. Brain Behav Immun. 2012;26:1095–1101.

Billones R, Saligan L. What works in mindfulness interventions for medically unexplained symptoms? A systematic review. Asian Pac Isl Nurs J. 2020;5:1–11.

Ford BQ, Karnilowicz HR, Mauss IB. Understanding reappraisal as a multicomponent process: the psychological health benefits of attempting to use reappraisal depend on reappraisal success. Emotion. 2017;17:905–911.

Keng SL, Smoski MJ, Robins CJ. Effects of mindfulness on psychological health: a review of empirical studies. Clin Psychol Rev. 2011;31:1041–1056.

 Lin TH, Tam KW, Yang YL, et al. Meditation-based therapy for chronic low back pain management: a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Pain Med. 2022;23:1800–1811.

 Tacón AM. Mindfulness: existential, loss, and grief factors in women with breast cancer. J Psychosoc Oncol. 2011;29:643–656.

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Most speech-language pathologists (SLPs) have very little experience and training in treating voice disorders. As part of their masters degree, SLPs are required to take one course in voice disorders — and that course may focus more on signs and symptoms than on treatment. If you’ve been diagnosed with a voice disorder, it is essential that you see an SLP who is well-versed in voice. But how can you know whether an SLPs has the experience to help you? This post will give you some ideas of what to look for or what questions to ask.