Elisabeth Kubler-Ross invalidity of her theory.
It's the transition that's troublesome.
In modern society death is a touchy subject for most persons. The subject is either avoided or said in euphemisms. There are persons though who study people's ideas attitudes and emotions towards death, Thanatologists. Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, was a Thanatologist from the 70's who gave insight on what she thought were the stages of what a dying person goes through. These stages are as follows, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. She found that the dying patients will go through these stages upon knowing that they are to die and that she found this as a way for the patient to cope with the idea of dying. .
When the patient she was speaking with was dying she would try to help them along in their dying process, and ease their mind in the transition to death. As stated in Claudia Chamberlain's Elisabeth Kubler-Ross talks about her own last stage (http://www.bereavement.org/her_own_last_stage.htm), "Accepting, but "Not Aiding, Death." was what Kubler-Ross helped patients do, at times the patients would want to give up but instead she helped them live while dying.
Criticisms of Kubler-Ross's work have arisen, people say her work started as a description and ended as a prescription. There is a lot of question of the validity of her work. In Heather Robertson's Article Dead Wrong, she explores the work of Michele Chaban a thanatologist who investigated Kubler-Ross's work with the dying process and critiques her theories.
.
To begin with, Kubler-Ross's theory seems quite faulted. It is very structured but people are not necessarily structured beings in how we do things. Her work has not been proven universally that each person upon knowing when they are about to die go through the consecutive stages of first denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Michele Chaban the person who investigated her work pointed out that people go through many different stages while dying, and they can be simultaneous.