Wellbeing and Meaning-making after a Near-Death Experience: The Changing Worldview of Non-Religious Near-Death Survivors

The Affective Experience Lab in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities invites you to a hybrid talk presented by Alex Fry at the Institute for Medical Humanities on 5 November 2024 at 4:00-5:30 pm. 

Near-death experiences are experiences associated with death or impending death. Those who have a near-death experience report substantial changes to how they find being in their bodies after a period of apparent disembodied consciousness. They also report viewing the world in a radically different way to how they did previously, in addition to experiencing alterations in how they relate to others. Such a shift in worldview has profound implications for individuals’ wellbeing—the equilibrium between challenging events and the ability to deal with them. Near-death survivors undergo a process of meaning-making as they re-evaluate their worldview in an attempt to make sense of their experience as doing so can be beneficial for their wellbeing.

This paper reports how near-death experiences come to shape the relationships that non-religious near-death survivors have with their body, the world and other persons. This paper will also show the impact that this has on the wellbeing of these individuals and the way in which they meaning-make as they pursue higher levels of wellbeing in their attempts to make sense of the world afresh. To do so, it will compare a thematic analysis of 16 semi-structured interviews with UK citizens and inhabitants who have had a near-death experience.

About the Speaker

Alex Fry is Senior Lecturer in the Sociology of Health and Illness at Bournemouth University. Much of his work explores the intersections between belief systems (whether religious or otherwise) and health and wellbeing. He was funded via the Explaining Atheism project to explore the relationship between near-death experiences, worldview and wellbeing amongst the non-religious. He is also working on a Church-of-England funded project on the wellbeing of disabled clergy, having recently completed work on the wellbeing of working-class clergy, which was covered in national media, such as BBC Radio 4, The Times and The Guardian.

The event is hosted by the Affective Experience Lab, led by Corinne Saunders and Fraser Riddell.