Prolonged Grief Disorder

This article discusses the forthcoming diagnostic classification of Prolonged Grief Disorder in light of sociological perspectives. By placing death and grief at the center of human life and culture, the beginning pathologization of grief may be discussed in regards to contemporary societal transformations. First, it will be discussed how grief can be viewed as an emotion that in many ways is essential for our self-understanding, self-relation and relation to others. Then, through the perspective of Zygmunt Bauman, it is discussed how death, and thereby grief, can be seen as constitutive for society and culture and how medicalization has played an important role in transforming our relationship to death and grief by a process of deconstruction. This perspective is then supplemented with Hartmut Rosa's discussion of accelerating society to illuminate why grief is now a disorder that requires psychiatric treatment. The article ends with a discussion of why these tendencies are problematic in regards to our conceptualization and understanding of grief. "Your absence has gone through me Like thread through a needle. Everything I do is stitched with its color"

This paper addresses how and why social restrictions imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic have affected people's experiences of grief. To do so, I adopt a broadly phenomenological approach, one that emphasizes how our experiences, thoughts, and activities are shaped by relations with other people. Drawing on first-person accounts of grief during the pandemic, I identify two principal (and overlapping) themes: (a) deprivation and disruption of interpersonal processes that play important roles in comprehending and adapting to bereavement; (b) disturbance of an experiential world in the context of which loss is more usually recognized and negotiated. The combination, I suggest, can amount to a sort of "grief within grief", involving a sense of stasis consistent with clinical descriptions of prolonged grief disorder.

This letter address and discuss perspectives stated in the article by Killikelly and Maercker "Prolonged grief disorder for ICD-11: the primacy of clinical utility and international applicability" (2017) published in the European Journal of Psychotraumatology, 8, 6. The discussion arrives at the estimation for a cautionary approach in relation to the utility and validity of PGD.