Lauren Breen is our top researcher in hospice and palliative care

Lauren Breen from Curtin University is Australia’s top researcher in hospice and palliative care.

Lauren Breen from Curtin University is Australia’s top researcher in hospice and palliative care.

As a community psychologist whose work is focused on loss, Lauren Breen says she felt like she was seen as that “weird grief lady” in the early days of her research.

When she began in the field two decades ago, only a handful of researchers worked in the area.

“For a long time, it felt that few people thought grief was a worthy topic of study and that it didn’t have the weight or gravitas of other areas. It has changed over time, but I felt like the ‘weird grief lady’ for years,” says Breen, who was named in The Australian’s 2025 Research magazine as Australia’s top researcher in the field of hospice and palliative care.

Her research has centred on understanding the psychology of grief and loss, and its impact on mental health. This has included work to improve palliative and end-of-life care, developing interventions to support people experiencing loss and promoting grief literacy in the community.

Using a variety of methodologies, the Curtin University professor hopes her research will help create a connected, caring society where grief is acknowledged and supported.

She says grief is not only a response to death, but can be the loss of something a person is attached to, such as the loss of identity or a job, or moving countries or ecological grief.

“Dying, death, loss and grief are part of life,” she says.

“I feel extraordinarily privileged to sit with people in these experiences and listen to their stories, and to use these stories to make a difference – in theory, policy and practice.

“I’ve interviewed people who have terminal and life-limiting illnesses, or their family members, or people who are grieving, and in many cases they haven’t had a chance to talk about it, because people shy away from these topics.”

In a recent project, she and her team have been investigating the kinds of questions bereaved children have about death and grief. They’ve explored grief literacy in the 14-to-24 age group and have been making social media videos with young people talking about their experiences.

It was when Breen was in her early 20s that the seeds for her future research were sown.

“I started in this area following the death of a family member in a car crash,” she says.

“I could see the ripples of impact it had and I wanted to understand it a lot more. I went to the literature, but I couldn’t find the answers I had assumed would be there.

“A few years later when I was looking for a research project for my PhD, I thought I could look into that.”

She’s since discovered a multitude of misperceptions, starting with the notion that grieving is a process to be moved through in an orderly fashion, culminating in acceptance.

“That’s rubbish, the idea that it goes through these neat, distinct stages in a set order, and that it ends in closure,” Breen says.

“I have banned the following words from my vocabulary: closure; moving on; letting go and recovery.

“It’s a process of adapting to and accommodating loss into your life. A lot of what I do is trying to bust those myths.”