Swiss-born American psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (born 1926) has pioneered the idea of providing psychological counseling to the dying. In her best-selling 1969 book, On Death and Dying, she describes the five mental stages that are experienced by those approaching death and suggests that death should be viewed as one of the normal stages of life.

Psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross has dedicated her career to a topic that had previously been avoided by many physicians and mental-health care professionals--the psychological state of the dying. In her counseling of and research on dying patients, Kübler-Ross determined that individuals go through five distinct mental stages when confronted with death, a discovery that has helped other counselors to provide more appropriate advice and treatment to their clients. Her ideas have been presented to the public in a number of popular texts, including her groundbreaking 1969 work, On Death and Dying...