Our culture encourages denial about death. While we don’t talk about it, death anxiety is a pervasive theme of being human, shaping much of what we think and do. Coming to terms with our mortality can only help us.
We first become aware of death’s universality, irreversibility and inevitability between the ages of three and nine. This terrifying discovery comes to us in gradual stages, says Professor Ross Menzies, a mental health author, professor of clinical psychology at the University of Technology, Sydney and practising clinical psychologist. From then on, we live our existence under the fearful spectre of death, he says, a bitter knowledge that’s the source of much (mostly subconscious and repressed) distress.
What’s less understood is how fear of death shapes human wellbeing, behaviour and society. This revelation is the crux of a groundbreaking book, Mortals: How the Fear of Death Shaped Human Society, co-authored by Menzies and daughter Dr Rachel Menzies (also an acclaimed psychologist). Death, they write, is the “worm at the core of the human psyche, nibbling away at our sense of security”.
Professor Menzies has been treating people with anxiety-related and mood disorders for more than 30 years. They’ve become a leading expert in the field of death anxiety. “To some extent it’s present in all of us,” he says. “It’s one of the great curses of being human.”
The human curse
All biological life perishes. But humans are doubly cursed by our awareness of death. It’s our intelligence and capacity for reflective consciousness that’s to blame. It allows us to contemplate the future, where, inevitably, as the duo write in Mortals, “all paths are leading — to the grave”.
Research, their book tells, shows death is greatly feared, for many to the point of undermining enjoyment in life. Death is our biggest fear in childhood and adolescence. Mercifully, death anxiety tends to subside in the last third of life, Professor Menzies says. “One obvious reason is that the quality of life is diminishing: you’re not losing as much,” he says. “You also may have become satisfied with what you achieved in life.”
Manifesting differently in all of us, death anxiety, he says, is a complex construct, because there’s no single, defining component. “Some people with death anxiety are worried about the notion of nothingness and going to nothingness; others are worried about missing out on things they’ll never get to see. Yet others are worried about loved ones dying: all of their death anxiety is about attachment figures they don’t think they could cope without. Some are worried about the passage to death. It’s ‘what if I got incredibly sick with a terminal illness, and it was a slow and painful passage to death’. You can end up terrified of death for a multitude of reasons.”
The root of anxiety
According to Professor Menzies, death anxiety drives a lot of mental health problems. Research by Dr Rachel Menzies, and her team at The University of Sydney, suggests our terror of “the end” is related to a variety of mental health problems. This link is particularly strong with anxiety disorders, such as panic disorder, somatic symptoms related to anxiety, generalised anxiety disorder, illness anxiety (dread of disease associated with excessive doctor visits and medical checks) and obsessive-compulsive disorder. (Rachel Menzies received the Dick Thompson Thesis Prize for her work on the link between death anxiety and OCD.)
“Anxiety is a very large number of conditions that we now think of as being derivatives of death anxiety,” Professor Menzies says. Anxiety around death may indeed be the underlying cause of many phobias — such as fear of the dark, spiders, germs, heights, flying, crime and natural disasters.
A link between death anxiety and depression is less clear, however Menzies believes it’s a factor in existential-type depressions. “They’re about, you know, what’s the point of my existence? I simply work all day, crash at the end of it, get up and do it again, and then eventually go to dust,” he says.
Coping mechanisms
Throughout the ages, we’ve employed various strategies for living with the knowledge of our demise. As discussed in Mortals, these range from plain old denial and suppression to seeking immortality in various guises. Think of egoic achievements, lasting legacies, continuing our genetic line. For many, the answer is to live a grand existence.
Traditionally, religions, with their varying beliefs about the afterlife, have been a source of comfort in all cultures. “If death is the oldest thorn in our side, then religion is its oldest balm,” the Menzies write in Mortals. What most religions share is the belief in an indestructible soul and the promise of immortality in the afterlife.
Harmful consequences
On the downside, our mechanisms for coping with death’s ever-present shadow are often maladaptive, damaging to us, society and the planet. Taken to its extreme, eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die, for instance, can bring on ill health.
There’s experimental research showing that the desire to have lots of children relates to death anxiety, Professor Menzies reveals. “We’ve over-populated our planet in part because of the deep desire to cheat death and leave our genetic material.”
Another unhelpful way we deal with death anxiety is to live well through consumerism, which causes obvious problems for the planet, he says. “And we know that religious wars and conflicts over who’s got the right story to death, are problematic.”
Life extension or death denial?
Echoing the pharaohs of ancient Egypt, the super wealthy today collectively spend billions to avoid death, albeit in the pursuit of life extension via science.
Professor Menzies finds the obsession in various areas of science to extend life at all costs, appalling. During COVID, for example, we shut down nursing homes and prevented the dying elderly from seeing their loved ones. “We put a greater price on getting that 93-year-old to 94 than we did on the quality of their life,” he says.
“It does seem strange that we can now keep people alive for a very long time, often in appalling circumstances where they’re demented, they may be blind and deaf. We’re obsessed in a way that doesn’t sugges