More Than One-Third of Bereaved May Have Prolonged Grief Disorder

More than one-third of people who are grieving meet theDSM-5 criteria forprolonged grief disorder, astudy in the Journal of Affective Disordershas found. Yet the results suggest that most people who are bereaved feel that their grief is a normal response to loss regardless of how long they ’ve been grieving.“Although respondents’ views of the normalcy of their grief may be subject to bias, as in any other area of self-evaluation, it is useful to know how bereaved individuals themselves view their grief experiences,” wrote Kara Thieleman, Ph.D., of Arizona State University and colleagues. The researchers surveyed 1,137 bereaved adults using the Prolonged Grief-13-Revised scale (PG-13-R), which is used to identify patients who meet the DSM-5 criteria for prolonged grief disorder. The PG-13-R asks whether an individual has experienced bereavement, how many months it has been since the loss, and whether symptoms of grief have caused impairment in the individual ’s functioning. For example, it asks “Do you feel yourself longing or yearning for the person who died?” Respondents were also asked to rate how normal of a response they believed each PG-13-R item to be. For example, they were asked “Do you feel it is normal for you to yearn for this person ?” The average time since the loss was 10.6 years.Overall, 34.3% of respondents met the criteria for a diagnosis of prolonged grief disorder, and 37.6% reported their grief impaired their functioning. When the re...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: accidents bereavement DSM-5 homicide Journal of Affective Disorders overdose prolonged grief disorder relationships Source Type: research