page_title: Mourning sickness
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Mourning sickness / History
caption_attribution_description: (c) Looi
context_page_description: Mourning sickness is a collective emotional condition of "recreational grieving" by individuals in the wake of celebrity deaths and other public traumas. Such traumas may be linked to hyper-attentive, intrusive, and voyeuristic media coverage, which has been dubbed grief porn.
context_section_description: The history of mourning sickness in Great Britain can be traced to the public reaction to the Dunblane massacre in March 1996 when a lone assailant killed 16 schoolchildren and their teacher at the Dunblane Primary School in Scotland, injuring 14 others. The tragedy prompted a public reaction that brought a flood of flowers and sympathy cards from across Britain and even overseas from people unconnected to the victims of the tragedy or even the area where it happened.
  A worldwide exhibit of mourning sickness, centred on Britain once again, following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997 when the Princess was killed in a car crash in Paris. Almost immediately following word of her death, makeshift memorials to Diana, who had been a hugely popular figure worldwide since her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981, began to pop up, most notably at her residence at Kensington Palace. The memorials became a gathering place for public weeping and for people to bring flowers. Ian Jack, writing in The Guardian, argued that this recreational grieving changed a simple observer of a news story into an active participant, changing people "from audience to actor".
  Similar displays of public grief occurred following the death in April 1998 of Linda McCartney (wife of former Beatle Paul McCartney), the murder of BBC journalist Jill Dando in April 1999, the murder of seven-year-old Surrey girl Sarah Payne in West Sussex in July 2000, and the murder of two 10-year-old girls from Soham, Cambridgeshire, in August 2002.
caption: A misspelled "In memoriam" message of condolence at Trafalgar Square following Princess Diana's death
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "72", "Image YResolution": "72", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS5 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2010:11:26 02:36:26", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6569", "EXIF ColorSpace": "sRGB", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "640", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "480"}