Newswise — Today, families, friends, and grief experts often tell mourners to move on as quickly as possible when tragic events such as someone’s death or divorce happen. Instead of community support, mourners do their grief work in private, behind closed doors, and with a professional who tries to “cure” them from their grief. Complicated, or Pathological Grief is a new diagnosis proposed be added to the Diagnostic and Statistics Manual of Mental Disorders in 2013. This means that a Grief Disorder diagnostic can be given to a bereaved person 3-6 months after someone has died depending on how the disease is defined.
This is too soon according to most, and giving people a diagnosis of grief will make them feel embarrassed and ashamed for not moving on fast enough.
In this post 9/11 world where shooting rampages, bombs going off in airports, wars, natural disasters such as the Haiti earthquake are common occurrences, we have a lot to mourn.
CIHR-funded researcher and psychologist Dr. Leeat Granek, is organizing a second CIHR funded meeting on grief and loss at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on February 11 and is available to discuss this event and alternatives to seeing grief as a psychological disorder.
The meeting involves health professionals, policy makers, professors, and members of community organizations interested in and/or currently engaged with research on grief and loss to share resources and find ways to build a budding cross-national exchange program on grief and loss.
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