Innovations in End-of-Life Care
an international journal of leaders in end-of-life care

Phyllis R. Silverman, PhD

Dr. Silverman is Professor Emerita at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. She is a Lecturer in Social Welfare in the Department of Psychiatry at Mass General Hospital and Harvard Medical School. She has been an active educator, researcher, and clinician focusing on bereavement for more than three decades. Her work is recognized both in the United States and abroad. In her early work she developed the concept of widow-to-widow peer support and directed the project that put this idea into practice. This project demonstrated the value of social support and of mutual help for widows. More recently she was co-principal investigator and project director of the MGH Child Bereavement Study, a longitudinal study of the impact of the death of a parent on dependent children. She is still analyzing data from this study, looking at it with a more qualitative lens to try to capture what grief looks like in children and how this experience affects their lives. Based on findings from this research she has challenged the concept of detachment and letting go as necessary aspects of the bereavement process.

Dr. Silverman currently serves on the research committee of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Association, and teaches as an Adjunct Professor in the Smith College School for Social Work End-of-Life Program. She has just been appointed a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women's Research Center where she will continue to pursue her long held interest in aspects of experience that are unique to women, such as childbearing and mothering, and how these experiences influence women's responses to loss. She was one of the founders of The Children's Room a program for bereaved children and their families, serving the greater Boston community. She serves on the board and facilitates a parent's group there. In this work, she finds a real world opportunity to test out the merit of some of her research findings and to validate the importance of volunteers' using some of their own experience with loss, to help bereaved children and their parents.

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