Medicalizing Grief: Psychiatrists Suggest If You Grieve Over A Lost Loved One After One Year, You Could Be An Addict! And There’s A Drug To “Treat” It!

In a continuing series exposing the American Psychiatric Association’s updated Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders-5 called DSM5-TR, CCHR draws attention to The New York Times on 18 March 2022, that reported the APA’s launch of a “new” mental disorder—prolonged grief disorder (PGD).  Psychiatrists suggest that grief has a time limit and that if grief continues after one year, it’s a mental illness, akin to addiction. The article was headlined, “How Long Should It Take to Grieve? Psychiatry Has Come Up With an Answer.” Come up with an answer? Hardly. It was psychiatry’s usual potpourri of subjective data, surveys, and conclusions that APA relies upon for DSM—not science discovering a disease. The official inclusion in DSM5-TR comes while there’s an addiction treatment drug under clinical trial to treat prolonged grief. It takes an extremely vulnerable and distressing time in a person’s life and pathologizes it as an “illness” that can be terribly misleading to someone in grief that for some, can last for years. There’s no etiology or cure for this new “disorder.” One study says that “the normal grieving process is not fully understood” but “one prominent theory holds that healthy grieving typically involves completion of loss-focused tasks and restoration focused tasks.” But that doesn’t stop psychiatrists from drugging the condition.