jamesteufel.com

Daniel Leviton has positioned the expansion of health education and promotion to include horrendous death.  Horrendous death includes acts of commission and omission.  People either intentionally, either directly or indirectly, commit acts that kill other people, or they unintentionally kill other people.  Daniel Leviton perceives horrendous death as preventable.  Though I agree with Dr. Levition, I would propose an extension of the concept of horrendous death.  The concept of horrendous death as positioned by Dr. Leviton is still biased toward the medicalization of health (morbidity and mortality) thereby focusing on life in contrast to physical death as opposed to focusing on life in contrast to existential opportunity, suffering, and death.  Given the breadth of health and well-being, this is an important shift.  From the perspective of “existential death,” people could suffer various types of death, which include intellectual death, emotional death, social death, physical death, and aspirational death.  Given the contemporary subtleties of oppression, suppression, and repression, it is important to expand the meaning of horrendous death.  In further elaborating on the content and contexts of death, people will also be more capable of preventing horrendous physical death.  Furthermore, the concept of existential death aligns with the contemporary social determinants of health and social justice movement.