Death anxiety

Death anxiety is anxiety caused by thoughts of one's own death, and is also known as thanatophobia (fear of death). Individuals affected by this kind of anxiety experience challenges and adversities in many aspects of their lives. Death anxiety is different from necrophobia, which refers to an irrational or disproportionate fear of dead bodies or of anything associated with death. Death anxiety has been found to affect people of differing demographic groups as well, such as men versus women, young versus old, etc. Different cultures can manifest aspects of death anxiety in differing degrees.

Psychotherapist Robert Langs (1928-2014) proposed three different causes of death anxiety: predatory, predator, and existential. In addition to his research, many theorists such as Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, and Ernest Becker have examined death anxiety and its impact on cognitive processing.

Anxiety caused by recent thought-content about death is sometimes classified by a psychiatrist in a clinical setting as morbid or abnormal, or a combination of the two. This classification pre-necessitates a degree of anxiety which is persistent and which interferes with everyday functioning. This high level of death anxiety in the elderly can cause lower ego integrity, and an increase in physical and psychological problems.

Researchers have linked death anxiety with several mental-health conditions. Common therapies that have been used to treat several mental-health conditions include psychotherapy and psychoanalysis. Users of these therapies explore the emotional processing and adaptations through patients' psychotherapy experience and how their mind is evolving to the emotionally affected experiences they have had in their life. Psychotherapies and psychoanalysis have been used to explore predatory death anxiety, as well as existential and predator death anxiety.

One meta-analysis of psychological interventions targeting death anxiety showed that cognitive behavioral therapy can reduce death anxiety.