What is prolonged grief and how long is it healthy to feel the pain of a loss?

After more than a decade of discussions, the largest psychiatric entity in the United States added a new disorder to your diagnostics manual: prolonged grief.

The decision marks an end to a long debate within the field of mental health, and causes researchers and clinicians to consider intense grief as a goal of medical treatment. It is significant because we are at a time when many feel overwhelmed by the loss of a loved one.

The new diagnosis prolonged grief disorderwas intended to describe a narrow portion of the population that is disabled, grieving and speculating one year after a lossand is unable to return to previous activities.

His inclusion in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders means that doctors can now bill insurance companies for treating people with this disease.

A diagnosis to help

Since the 1990s, several researchers have said that intense forms of grief should be classified as a mental illnesssince they affirm that society usually accepts the suffering of the afflicted as something naturalhence they are not directed to a treatment that could help them.

They expect a diagnosis helps doctors to cure part of the population that, throughout history, has withdrawn into isolation after a terrible loss.

“They were the widowers and widowers who wore black for the rest of their liveswho withdrew from social contact and they lived the rest of their lives in memory of the spouse they had lostexplained Paul Appelbaum, chairman of the steering committee overseeing revisions to the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. “They were the parents who never got over it, and that’s how we talked about them. In colloquial terms we would say that they never got over the death of their son”.

Throughout this time, critics of the idea have argued strongly against the categorization of grief as a mental disorder, claiming that such a designation runs the risk of making a fundamental aspect of human experience pathological.

In 2010, when the American Psychiatric Association proposed expanding the definition of depression to include bereaved people, sparked a backlash, reinforcing broader criticism that mental health professionals were overdiagnosing and overmedicating patients.

However, researchers continued to work on grief, seeing it more and more as something other than depression and more related to stress disorders, similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Among them was M. Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who developed a 16-week psychotherapy program that relies heavily on exposure techniques used for trauma victims.

For 2016, data from clinical trials showed that Shear’s therapy gave good results in patients suffering from intense grief, and outperformed antidepressants and other anti-depression therapies. those results reinforced the argument for including the new diagnosis in the manualsaid Appelbaum, chairman of the committee tasked with revising the manual.

The trickiest question of all was this: How long could be considered prolonged?

The American Psychiatric Association He “begged and implored” that the disorder be defined in more conservative terms—one year after the death—in order to avoid a negative reaction from the public.

“I have to say they were very smart in considering the politics of it.”, said. The concern was that the public “would be outraged, because everyone feels a little pain, even if it is for their grandmother six months after her death, they still miss her”, he indicated. “It seems as if you made love a pathology.”