Silver lining: New approaches in treating prolonged grief disorder

It is normal for people to grieve after the death of a family member or close friend. However, while the pain of loss usually slowly diminishes within months or a year and the relatives feel much better afterwards and hardly experience any restrictions in their daily lives, severe longing, helplessness, fear or anger occur far beyond that in the case of prolonged grief. "It's a pain that doesn't go away. The feelings overwhelm the affected person and can permeate every aspect of life", explains Rita Rosner, Chair of Biological and Clinical Psychology at the KU. She has long been working on the phenomenon of prolonged grief disorder (PGD), which has now been included as a disorder in the ICD-11, the international classification system for medical diagnoses.

Based on various studies, experts assume that around five percent of mourners develop such a disorder. If the loss was very unexpected or the circumstances of the death were particularly traumatic, this increases the likelihood of PGD, as does the likelihood of PGD in people who are already suffering from a mental illness for other reasons. "For many patients, the death of a loved one already occurred many years ago", explains Rosner. But they were still suffering from the loss. Those affected are sometimes unable to pursue their profession or take care of their family. The unbroken feelings of missing the dead can also manifest themselves in the fact that the deceased child's room remains untouched or the deceased husband's jacket is still hanging in the wardrobe. Medication is not effective for prolonged grief disorder – but psychotherapy can help in many cases.