What is the correct amount of grief? How much bereavement constitutes an appropriate portion? And when does the expected sorrow of loss cross over into something else to be reckoned with — a mental health problem?
The newest update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders arrived earlier this month with an expected — if long debated over — addition: the identification of a condition known as "prolonged grief disorder." The terminology has been over a decade in the making, spurred in part by inquiry surrounding the intersection of bereavement and depression. Yet it arrives now at a moment of uniquely fresh and widepread grief, a time of, as the American Psychiatry Association notes, "several ongoing disasters that have caused death and suffering, such as COVID-19, the wind-down in Afghanistan, floods, fires, hurricanes and gun violence."
