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He noticed something strange: In most cases, patients responded well to antidepressant medications, but their grief as measured by a standard question inventory, unaffected, stubbornly remained high. When he told this to the psychiatrists on the team, they showed little interest.
“The grief is normal,” she remembers being told. “We are psychiatrists and we don’t worry about grief. We worry about depression and anxiety.” His reply was, “Well, how do you know it’s not a problem?” it happened.
Dr. Prigerson began collecting data. He concluded and speculated that many symptoms of intense grief, such as “longing, longing, and longing,” are different from depression. bad results such as high blood pressure and suicidal thoughts.
Research shows that the symptoms of grief for most people peaked in six months after death. A group of outliers — estimated at 4 percent of bereaved individuals — remained “stuck and miserable” and will continue to struggle with mood, functioning and sleep over the long term.
“You won’t have another soul mate and you kind of spend your days squirming,” she said.
In 2010, when the American Psychiatric Association proposed expanding the definition of depression to include people in mourning, a reaction, feeding into broader criticism that mental health professionals overdiagnose patients and overuse drugs.
“You have to understand that clinicians want a diagnosis so they can categorize people who come through the door and get reimbursed,” said Jerome C. Wakefield, professor of social work at New York University. “This is a huge pressure on DSM”
Still, researchers continued to study grief and increasingly saw it as distinct from depression and more closely related to stress disorders such as post-traumatic stress disorder. D., a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University, who has developed a 16-week psychotherapy program that draws heavily from exposure techniques used for trauma survivors. M. Katherine Shear was also present.
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