Lesson 1 of 6 · What grief actually does
Most people come through this without treatment
That sentence is not a reason to keep quiet and get on with it, and it is not a compliment paid to people who suffer silently.
It is a plain finding, and it has a consequence. Most bereaved people do not need a professional and do not benefit from being handed one. There is even evidence that offering grief treatment to everybody who has been bereaved does more harm than good in some cases, and lesson six deals with that honestly.
So this course is not going to treat you as a patient. It normalises, it corrects some things you have probably been told, it hands back what the tradition already gives, and it names the smaller group for whom none of that is enough.
If you are in that smaller group, lesson six is the important one, and there is nothing to be ashamed of in being in it.
What the research says
The same distinction, stated again: general bereavement support gives very small and fading benefits, while treatment aimed at people in serious difficulty works. That is why the offer here is a threshold rather than a service.
The review is known for a difference between two groups. Treatment offered to bereaved people in general produced very small benefits that largely faded by follow up, while treatment aimed at people with complicated or prolonged grief produced meaningfully larger ones. We have not read the effect sizes off the paper itself, so none are printed here, and it is cited for the direction of the result only.
Currier JM, Neimeyer RA, Berman JS (2008). The effectiveness of psychotherapeutic interventions for bereaved persons: a comprehensive quantitative review. Psychological Bulletin, 134(5), 648 to 661 doi