Debate manages death anxiety.

This qualitative study addressed the different meanings that a death-education project can promote in high schools, showing that students highlighted no harmful effects. Indeed, their responses evinced great motivation and interest in participating in all the discussions and project activities. Students recognised the relevance and value of an open debate about death-related issues to share concerns and anxieties and to know classmates better. Like what has already been described in the literature [21,34,36,51,52], our results show that students perceived these activities as teaching them to appreciate life, grasp the importance of enhancing one’s own existence and enjoy life fully. They also appreciated the possibility of discussing their greatest fear, namely, the death of loved ones, and sharing those thoughts and feelings with others. Indeed, as already shown [36,53], this is the greatest fear that the thought of death evokes. However, their answers were also consistent with previous studies and perspectives that show that the notion of an afterlife can reduce the anxiety that this thought provokes [21,34,54]. The present study does not report any gender differences related to death anxiety, which, instead, were investigated and discussed in the quantitative part of the project [21]. Moreover, the possibility of communicating one’s own difficult emotions produced both a sense of liberation and greater empathy for others, activating the discussion on everyday meanings, from the simplest to the most important existential themes. Furthermore, they reported the experience, giving them the possibility to clarify their own beliefs regarding the representation of death as a passage or as a definitive end. The main advantage of this study is that it highlights the fact that although death is a thought that causes strong anxiety, as demonstrated by TMT, it is also possible to manage such anxiety by directing emotions and thoughts towards culturally significant existential content. Existential reflection, in fact, if guided by relevant content, can transform fear into a search for meaning [43,55], enhancing the relationships between students that, in this research, were activated by the death-education activities.