ABSTRACT
In 1980 Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was introduced as a diagnostic category in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd Edition) (DSM-III; American Psychiatric Association, 1980). It is the only disorder in the current DSM nomenclature in which a cause of the disorder is included, namely a (psycho)trauma (or more than one). The proposed DSM-5 disorders Prolonged Grief Disorder (Prigerson et al., 2009) and Complicated Grief (CG; Shear et al., 2011) resemble PTSD in that a necessary cause is also specified, namely the loss of a significant other, in particular the death of a loved one. Both could fit in a general rubric of event-related disturbances, as was already argued in the 1990s (Brom, Kleber, & van den Bout, 1993). For that reason it is illuminating to review what the scientific, clinical, and societal consequences have been of the introduction of PTSD in the DSM system. What have been the pros and cons of the construct PTSD since its inclusion in DSM? And, after more than three decades of research and clinical work, what lessons are there to be learnt for the concepts of prolonged grief disorder and complicated grief, in case one of them (or an amalgam of these) is ‘canonized’ in DSM-5?
