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The American Psychiatric Association (APA) has now recognized Prolonged Grief Disorder as an official psychiatric condition, a long-sought change.
America's most influential organization in the field released its latest edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5), adding "prolonged grief disorder" to its list.
The guide helps medical professionals, researchers, and others in the industry recognize, diagnose, and treat certain psychiatric disorders.
Experts have long called for “sadness” to be considered an official disorder when people feel it for longer than usual for six months.
With the official listing, researchers and medical professionals should now have easier access to funds and resources to study the condition and its causes.
The American Psychiatric Association now officially considers Prolonged Grief Disorder a psychiatric disorder, opening the door to further research and development of medications for the condition
“Two hundred experienced researchers and practitioners have invested countless hours to ensure that the DSM-5-TR is an indispensable contribution to our understanding of mental illness,” said Dr. Saul Levin, CEO of the APA, on the handbook.
Debate over the issue can be traced back to the publication of the handbook a decade ago, when some experts wanted the disorder to be separated from depression and placed in its own category.
The condition is described as a person experiencing grief for longer than usual after a major life event.
While the loss of a friend, family member, or other tragedy obviously causes feelings of grief in someone, intense grief is not expected to last longer than six months.
However, for some people, debilitating, life-altering feelings of grief can last well beyond this period and begin to have long-term negative effects on their lives.
“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 man or woman they had lost,” Dr. Paul Appelbaum, chair of the steering committee overseeing revisions to the manual, said New York Times.
“They were the parents who never got over it, and that’s how we talked about them.
“In colloquial terms, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.”
Some fear that turning grief into a medical condition rather than a natural human process can be dangerous and oppose the APA decision
Some studies have even found that while people who are grieving experience better mental health after taking medications like antidepressants, the medications did little to ease their grief.
However, not everyone agrees with this change. Grief is a normal part of human life, and it is not unusual to feel it after a major loss or other traumatic event.
“I completely disagree that grief is a mental illness,” Joanne Cacciatore, an associate professor of social work at Arizona State University, told the Times.
Some fear that pharmaceutical companies will use this as an excuse to give drugs to people who are going through a normal, healthy process
Other experts believe this could make people anxious or uncertain about the process.
“When someone who is a quote-unquote expert tells us that we are disturbed and feel very vulnerable and overwhelmed, we no longer trust ourselves or our emotions,” Cacciatore said.
“To me, this is an incredibly dangerous move and short-sighted.”