Lesson 6 of 6 · When grief has become something else
What prolonged grief disorder is, and what it is not
There is now a recognised condition for grief that stays at full intensity and stops a life from running. It is in both of the main diagnostic systems.
What it is not is a long grief. It is not still crying at the anniversary, still missing them daily, or still finding November hard three years later. Those are ordinary.
What it describes is grief that has not moved at all, well past the point where the systems set their threshold, and that is preventing a person from functioning.
We are not printing the criteria. The two systems set different time thresholds and word them differently, and we have not verified either wording against the printed source. A course that half remembers a diagnostic threshold and prints it is doing harm, so this one is telling you that the condition exists and that a clinician is the person who applies it.
There is no test in this course and there is no score. Nobody here is going to tell you which side of a line you are on.
What the research says
The work behind these criteria being recognised at all, tested against bereaved samples. It is here only to show the condition was defined and tested rather than asserted, so that if you meet it you are meeting something real.
The work behind the criteria being recognised at all, testing them against bereaved samples. It is cited here only to show that the condition has been defined and tested rather than asserted. The thresholds and the wording are deliberately not reproduced on this page, and applying them is a clinician's job.
Prigerson HG, Boelen PA, Xu J, Smith KV, Maciejewski PK (2021). Validation of the new DSM-5-TR criteria for prolonged grief disorder and the PG-13-Revised (PG-13-R) scale. World Psychiatry, 20(1), 96 to 106 doi