Professor emeritus Toni Miles said her work truly began when she retired from the University of Georgia in 2021.
She said she had wanted for nearly a decade to study the injurious effects of bereavement on a community or a large group of people.
"I've been looking for ways to measure it," she said. "We can tell how many people die, but we don't know who they're connected to. That's one way of thinking about it."
Miles asked a number of data collection agencies such as the Department of Community Health to include a survey question about how people are coping with grief.
"You lost somebody; you were the one who's left behind," she said. "Someone else has died in your orbit, and you're still alive and dealing with that."
One way people cope is alcohol.
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Miles considers excessive alcohol use a public health issue, and she said she hopes to find a perspective by which society could learn to better protect people from the negative health effects of bereavement.
Binge drinking is one of those things the public health community agrees is a problem, Miles said. "But ... it's not studied well," she said.
She defined binge drinking as four drinks in an hour for women or five drinks an hour for men. Researchers are seeing underage and young adult drinkers engage in binge drinking, whereas older adults are more likely just to be chronically drunk, Miles said.
The new study, published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, is the first time bereavement and its association with binge drinking has been examined among adults in Georgia. Miles said there are 8.1 million people in Georgia who are ages 18 and over, and 45% of those people reported a loss between 2017 and 2018.
Of the roughly 1.7 million people in Georgia who reported drinking, Miles extrapolated that about 600,000 would fall into the binge drinker category.
That is one way people can die of a broken heart, Miles said.
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When one metaphorically drowns their grief in alcohol, they damage their physical bodies.
"Your own health can be destabilized by that surge of adrenaline you get," Miles said. "You can have a stroke. That's a form of a broken heart. People kill themselves."
There are many ways that bereavement will lead to your own death, she said, and this is commonly seen among caregivers and older adults with dementia.
Caregivers are particularly affected by bereavement
Jennifer Olsen, CEO of the the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers, said the organization works with Miles because the institute values research that aims to support bereaved caregivers.
Olsen said Carter, the institute's namesake and founder, often said there are four kinds of caregiver roles: those who have been caregivers those who are currently caregivers, those who will be caregivers and those who will need caregivers.
"Well, if that's the case, what can we look at and how can we support individuals as their journey changes from present caregiver to past caregiver?" Olsen said.
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Olsen said the institute is interested in the context in which a bereaved person uses or misuses addictive substances and what additional mental health needs should be addressed.
"We think there's a more broad need for recognizing that these physical and mental health impacts of providing care are currently not recognized across all of the federal government or even in state governments," she said. "You know, there's not an office of caregiver health that's looking at these health impacts and figuring out where policy, program and resources should be put, whether that's for payment or for additional mental health supports and counseling for this population."
Former caregivers can show support for policy change by showing up and advocating at the state capitol, Olsen said.
Funding more research and more community access to mental and behavioral health is necessary, Miles said.
"It's, again, one of those things because we don't want to talk about it, we don't want to think about it," Miles said. "We just keep replicating this cycle of illness."