‘Prolonged Grief Disorder’ Now a Mental Health Diagnosis

THEIR TURN TO CRY –

Mar. 22, 2022 – It will most likely open a stream of funding for research into treatments — naltrexone, a drug used to help treat addiction, is currently in clinical trials as a form of grief therapy — and set off a competition for approval of medicines by the Food and Drug Administration. “They were the widows who wore black for the rest of their lives, who withdrew from social contacts and lived the rest of their lives in memory of the husband or wife who they had lost,” said Dr. Paul S. Appelbaum, who is chair of the steering committee overseeing revisions to the fifth edition of the D.S.M.

“They were the parents who never got over it, and that was how we talked about them,” he said. “Colloquially, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.” They warn that there will be false positives — grieving people told by doctors that they have mental illnesses when they are actually emerging, slowly but naturally, from their losses.