Is complicated/prolonged grief a disorder?

Should prolonged intense grief be classified as a mental disorder in DSM-5? This is what two research groups studying “prolonged grief disorder” (PGD) or “complicated grief disorder” (CG) have proposed (Prigerson et al., 2009; Shear et al., 2011). Rather than considering prolonged intense grief generally to be a painful but normal-range phenomenon that is on the upper end of the continuum of grief severity, and rather than seeing such severity as reflecting normally varying factors such as closeness of the lost relationship and the griever’s circumstances and temperament, existential nature, and history, these researchers argue that grief that satisfies certain symptom and duration criteria should be considered in and of itself a psychiatric disorder.