Background

According to the Australian Federal Police (AFP), 145 Australians are reported missing every day. When a loved one goes missing, there is no right way to deal with it. You oscillate from hope to hopelessness, overwhelmed by the physical, mental and emotional burden, often feeling no one understands what you’re going through. Ambiguous loss is a unique and harrowing type of grief experienced by the loved ones of long-term missing persons¬ – considered by many psychologists to be the most traumatic type of loss. Unlike standard grief, it is a continual loss, complicating and delaying the grieving process, leading to unresolved grief. In partnership with MPAN, we set out to help affected family and friends navigate this loss.

Tension

How can you help someone deal with the most traumatic grief, when there’s no resolution and no-one realises what you’re going through?

Approach

The Hope Narratives is a world-first therapeutic tool for putting the emotional complexity of ambiguous loss into words, using the lived experiences of others. Created with global ambiguous loss expert, Dr Sarah Wayland, the Hope Narratives are designed to help people find a way through the grief, and to know they are not alone. The cards combine over 500 collective years of experience into 145 modular statements, which connect to become over 1.4 million possible Hope Narratives.

The cards were launched ahead of National Missing Persons Week (July 31–August 6 2022), with the aim to bring out real and authentic emotions and validate experiences in a meaningful way.
“By supporting loved ones with this very special set of cards, our aim is to address a complicated grief that’s historically been a misunderstood area of mental health for thousands of Australians.” MPAN chief executive Loren O’Keeffe.