ABSTRACT
Among the bereaved people who seek psychiatric help after bereavement nearly all are found to have suffered unusually traumatic forms of bereavement and/or to show evidence of prior vulnerability. Sudden unexpected deaths, multiple deaths, violent deaths and deaths involving human agency (murders, suicides, etc.) represent a special risk to mental health even in the absence of other vulnerability. By comparison natural deaths are relatively untraumatic (Weinberg, 1994).
