Complicated Grief

The subject of complicated grief was discussed during HFA 2007 national teleconference, Before and After the Death, and in the chapter Challenging the Paradigm: New Understandings of Grief, from the companion book.

Today's New York Times puts the academic question of complicated grief front and center in Fran Schumer's article, "After a Death, the Pain That Doesn’t Go Away."

Each of the 2.5 million annual deaths in the United States directly affects four other people, on average. For most of these people, the suffering is finite — painful and lasting, of course, but not so disabling that 2 or 20 years later the person can barely get out of bed in the morning.

For some people, however — an estimated 15 percent of the bereaved population, or more than a million people a year — grieving becomes what Dr. M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia, calls “a loop of suffering.” And these people, Dr. Shear added, can barely function. “It takes a person away from humanity,” she said of their suffering, “and has no redemptive value.”

This extreme form of grieving, called complicated grief or prolonged grief disorder, has attracted so much attention in recent years that it is one of only a handful of disorders under consideration for being added to the DSM-V, the American Psychiatric Association’s handbook for diagnosing mental disorders, due out in 2012.

For more resources, see the Grief section of HFA's website.