Your patient, an Orthodox Jew, learns that his only son, after several days of intensive medical treatment, has just died of a sports-related head injury. Your patient reacts by crying and asking why God allows children to suffer and die
You recognize that your patient is grieving and is in a state of acute a. emotional distress most likely due to his loss and feelings of guilt.
b. physical exhaustion most likely due to lack of sleep.
c. spiritual distress most likely due to long-standing anger toward God.
d. spiritual distress most likely due to his painful awareness of human mortality.
D
Your patient is crying and asking why God allows children to suffer and die, which implies spiritual distress, not emotional distress or physical exhaustion. Spiritual distress is the state in which a person feels that his belief system, or his place within it, is threatened. Any threat to one's own life, any reminder of one's own mortality, can serve to evoke both wonderment about the meaning and purpose of life and disquiet about the answers that spirituality or religion provide. Your patient is in a state of acute spiritual distress. His son's death has served as a reminder of his own mortality. There is no mention of any long-standing anger toward God.
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