The CME on Grief counseling session started at 2.30 pm, May 22 2010. There were about 18 participants. Mrs. Chandni Srinivasan, the faculty, then proceeded to get to know each participant personally and noted the wide range of professional qualification amongst them.

Psychology, Mrs. Chandni explained, came from Psyche + logy, which was study of the soul, or the behavior and thoughts.

Sigmund Freud who is known as the father of Psychology wrote that our personality had three elements - “id” which was conscious behavior, “ego” which was a check on id and “superego” which was basically about morality and preventing us from doing wrong things. He said that childhood was the most important phase of a human where he/she developed self confidence.

We then had an interesting exercise on self esteem. We had to answer 10 questions with a Yes/No that tested your self esteem in various aspects like how you react to other’s success or criticism, how you really feel about your achievements. These questions were answered by all, and everybody participated, telling out aloud the answers they had marked and Mrs. Chandni gave very insightful explanations on why they have marked their answers that way and what concrete steps they can take to build self esteem.

This was followed by explanation about types of psychologists:

1) Educational psychologists who dealt with students, memory techniques, stress during examinations

2) Counseling psychologists who gave advice on day to day behavior, and how to tackle problems.

3) Engineering psychologists (for eg. In NASA)

4) Forensic psychologists (crime related)

Differences between a psychologist, psychotherapist was also explained.

There was short break, after which we had a session on Ego Defense Mechanisms, followed by 8 stages of psychological development defined by Erik Erickson and the Five stages of Grief which were Anger, Denial, Bargaining stage, Depression and Acceptance, defined by Elizabeth Kübler Ross who had worked with Jewish community after the holocaust. This was very interesting to relate to for Transplant coordinators and during discussions they shared their experiences with everybody.

All in all, it was a very interesting, informative and informal session, with everybody eager for the next session the following Saturday.

The session concluded followed by a very spirited discussion by participants on MOHAN Foundation and how we could promote Organ Donation in our Society with Dr Sunil Shroff joining us towards the end.