Complicated grief in the context of other psychiatric disorders

The consideration of the possibility of “pathologies” of grief has a substantial history in literature, reflected in prolonged and debilitating mourning overwhelming the bereaved’s life: they live on, as it were, in their continuing relationship with the deceased to the exclusion of other life. Freud (1917), in “Mourning and Melancholia,” discussed the potential for grief to lead to depression. “Traumatic” grief has also been considered as a possible entity (Raphael, 1983). Recent research has highlighted the distinction between complicated grief, depression, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) as separate syndromes (Boelen, van de Schoot, van den Hout, de Keijser, & van den Bout, 2010; Golden & Dalgleish, 2010).