ABSTRACT
In January of 2012, Benedict Carey, a writer for The New York Times, introduced an article on the pathologization of grief with the question, “When does a broken heart become a diagnosis?” (Carey, 2012). In the field of psychology and its related disciplines (psychiatry, social work, medicine etc.), the question of what makes grief pathology has been hotly debated in the last several decades. Questions around what grief should look like, how long it should last, and how it should be treated have circulated in the academic spheres and, more recently, in mainstream media outlets like the article in The Times. My own work on the pathologization of grief (see: Granek, 2008; 2010; 2013a; 2013b; Granek & O’Rourke, 2012) has asked a broader set of questions. As a critical scholar on grief, I am less interested in what constitutes pathological grief and more interested in asking questions about how grief got medicalized in the first place, what are the motivations for pathologizing grief, and most importantly, what are the implications for contemporary mourners in thinking about and understanding their grief within a medicalized frame. In this chapter, I touch on each of these issues sequentially.
