Take two: researchers find their single voice on mortality

In this Q&A, Rachel and Ross Menzies share insights about their writing process and why death anxiety is an intrinsic part of being human.

RACHEL

How did you end up becoming an expert in death anxiety?

I’ve always been fascinated with death. As a child, I was obsessed with ancient Egyptian burial rituals and mummification, and was drawn to images of skulls and skeletons. This fascination continued into my teenage years; for my HSC Extension English major work, I wrote a series of short stories, each of which explored a character’s struggle with impermanence and mortality. At university, I studied ancient history alongside psychology, and was struck by the fact that the fear of death seemed to riddle all of the ancient texts I was reading.  I also learned more about the various ways ancient cultures dealt with death, which all seemed like manifestations of this same fear.

Around this time, my dad and I began to discuss his observations from his clinical practice, and his growing sense that death was the common theme underlying so many mental health conditions. We ended up co-authoring an academic paper on the topic of death anxiety in mental health, which was published in 2014. I have continued to work in this area ever since.

Can you briefly describe what death anxiety is?

Death anxiety is the fear or dread brought about by our awareness of mortality. It can include worries about one’s own death, or the process of dying, or the death of loved ones. Death anxiety is unique to humans, because we are the only species that we know of with the capacity to imagine and contemplate our own end. This awareness of our own death, and the fear this brings up, is a central part of being human. In fact, death anxiety appears as a theme in some of our species’ oldest surviving writings, stretching back at least 4000 years.

Is the topic a barbecue stopper?

It can be, but it can also be a great conversation starter. Some people are clearly perturbed when I talk about my area of work, but other people leap at the opportunity to have someone to speak to about death. I suppose because it’s such a taboo topic, for some people it’s a rare chance to open up about their thoughts or worries about death. It really can go either way.

What have been the most surprising/profound things you’ve learned about humans and death?

When I first came across Terror Management Theory in my undergraduate psychology studies, I was shocked to learn about all the different ways people unconsciously deal with the fear of death. Terror Management Theory is the leading psychological theory explaining the impact of death anxiety on human behaviour. It expanded on the work of Ernest Becker, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book The Denial of Death, in which he argued that the entirety of human culture is an elaborate defence mechanism in the face of death.

According to Becker and Terror Management Theory, cultural creations such as nations, religions, ideologies and values systems help to give us a sense of meaning in a meaningless world. When we buy into our culture’s shared worldviews and belief systems, we gain a sense of significance and permanence, and feel that we will live on through something greater than ourselves. Hundreds of studies done in laboratories show that when people are given subtle reminders of death, their behaviour dramatically changes. For example, they become more nationalistic, more materialistic, and more interested in extending the self through any avenues open to them, such as by having children. These experiments even show that reminding people of death makes them more aggressive towards people whose political or religious beliefs conflict with their own.

In short, in response to death, we bunker down in our own cultural worldviews, and become hostile to anyone whose views challenge ours. Interestingly, this is largely outside of conscious awareness. In these studies, people aren’t aware that the reminder of death they had earlier in the experiment is having any impact on the behaviour in question.  This surprising finding suggests that our everyday behaviours are being shaped by our unconscious fear of death, and we’re not aware of it.

How has your dad’s career in psychology influenced your study and research choices – going back to childhood?

I remember my dad driving me to primary school some mornings and talking to me about one mental illness or another, or where anxiety comes from, or something similar. By the time I was about eight, I knew I wanted to be a psychologist once day. But he always gave me the freedom to pursue other things I was interested in, such as ancient history, which surprisingly ended up serving me very well in my psychology career.

The two of us have worked together for nearly a decade now, and have written and travelled together extensively during that time. Not many children would sign themselves up for working so closely with their own parent; the fact that it’s been so enjoyable is a real testament to the kind of father he is.

What sort of writing partners are you?

Because we’ve spent so many years working together, we tend to think and write in similar ways. For example, at one point while writing Mortals, there was an error in dividing up the work, and we both accidentally ended up writing on the same topic, without the other realising. When I looked over our two versions, I couldn’t believe how the texts we had written independently ended up looking eerily similar. But I think our approaches to writing are also slightly different, and we complement each other’s writing style quite well. I think this helps Mortals have a balanced style, which is at turns both solemn yet playful.

ROSS

You’ve had a long and distinguished career in psychology. What have been the surprises and highlights so far?

I think I’ve been surprised by the speed of change in the profession. Discoveries about the nature of the conditions that we treat have come thick and fast, particularly in the past 20 years. It’s become increasingly difficult to stay on top of the relevant literature in all areas of psychology. As for personal highlights, convening the 8th World Congress of Behavioural and Cognitive Therapies (WCBCT) in 2016 is very high on my list. The planning took me more than a decade, and it dominated much of my work life in the 18 months leading up to the event.

Did you encourage Rachel into undergraduate psychology?

From a young age, Rachel displayed a genuine interest in psychology, although she was also deeply interested in ancient history and other disciplines in the humanities. As it turned out, her second major in history has become a great asset in her research work and scholarship. Mortals combines history, archaeology, art history, sociology and literature as well as psychology, biology and even climate science. It’s a book I couldn’t have written alone. Mortals rests very much of the breadth of Rachel’s academic background.

Your research focuses more on general anxiety. How did the focus on death anxiety arise?

Across the first 20 years of my clinical practice I started to notice similarities in the different disorders I was seeing. In so many ways, the different clinical presentations I was treating seemed to all involve the prevention of death. Individuals with panic disorder would end up in Accident and Emergency on a weekly basis in response to chest pain. Clients with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder would spend hours washing their skin to eliminate germs, or check gas stoves and power points to avoid catastrophes. Some were even terrified that their thoughts could magically kill family members or loved ones. These clients typically developed elaborate mantras and rituals as a form of protection. I saw the same dread of death in those with phobias of planes, cars, heights, spiders, snakes and enclosed spaces. All roads seemed to lead back to death.

For more than 18 months, the pandemic has dominated the news cycle. Is it leading to greater death anxiety?

We live in strange times. In many ways, it feels like we’re in a real-time social psychology experiment. Every day we become primed with death. Symbols of death are all around us including face masks, warnings on shopfront doors and windows, QR code check-ins and, of course, daily body counts on the news. All of this has brought death to the forefront of consciousness. It’s no longer hiding away deep within the psyche. These daily reminders have clearly increased the levels of fear in many individuals. But equally, we see those who use denial as their defence against the crisis. They refuse to vaccinate or wear masks, believe COVID threats are overstated and generally ignore medical advice. The pandemic has divided the community in many ways.

What are the important messages in your book for this time in our history?

I think we need to move toward a far greater acceptance of death. For so long we’ve tried to deny death, principally by creating religious systems. The bullish promise of immortality has been the most common ingredient at the core of religious practice across our history. We need to face that we are mortal apes. 107 billion humans have lived before us. Each has come and gone. And so shall you and I. Unfortunately, as a species we’ve become obsessed with defeating death. Medical science sees death as its enemy, and we continue to hide the sick and aged away from us.  Death is still regarded as a ‘failed outcome’ in the health care system.

What sort of daughter is Rachel?

She was a very easy child to parent. She’s quite a steady person in many ways. As the eldest of four, she’s a loving sister and a positive role model. Perhaps she works too hard, but the apple never falls far from the tree. What’s most surprised me is that she’s taught me things. I always imagined fatherhood as simply passing on life lessons to the generation below mine. Rachel has shown me that the learning is bidirectional.

What sort of writing partners are you?

Three years ago, Rachel and I did a workshop speaking tour of Australian capital cities for the Australian Association for Cognitive and Behaviour Therapy (AACBT). We taught together on death anxiety for eight hours a day. I think this intensive teaching helped us find a single voice. Our approach to writing Mortals was very much to divide and conquer. Each of us took the lead for roughly half the book, and then we read the other’s sections and added our own stamp to them. I believe we’ve achieved a seamless style that should be very accessible. I hope I’m right.

Mortals: How the fear of death shaped human society, by Rachel E. Menzies and Ross G. Menzies, is published by Allen & Unwin.

Rachel Menzies is a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of Sydney. Ross Menzies is a professor in the Graduate School of Health at UTS.