The experience of loss and grief may be timeless, but our understanding of the psychological processes it entails has evolved greatly in recent years. In the first module of this Core Course Series, we will consider adaptive grieving as a process of reaffirming or reconstructing a world of meaning that has been challenged by loss. In contrast to older models of grief as a series of “stages” of emotional adjustment, this meaning reconstruction model underscores the personal and social means of processing the “event story” of the death and also accessing the “back story” of the relation with the one who has died to integrate both into the mourner’s ongoing life story.
As both research and practical experience teach us, however, for a significant subset of the bereaved, grieving may become a protracted and life-limiting ordeal, one that can undermine the quality of their relationships to others, their ability to pursue purposeful work, and even to preserve their basic physical health. We will therefore review recently established diagnostic criteria for complicated, prolonged grief In both the ICD-11 of the World Health Organization and the DSM 5-TR of the American Psychiatric Association, and discuss their points of convergence and divergence as well as clinical utility. Going beyond identifying mourners who are suffering from prolonged grief, we will then explore the role of meaning as a mediator of evidence-based risk factors for this disorder, and introduce two carefully validated and clinically useful measures of challenges to making meaning of loss at personal and interpersonal levels in the griever’s family and community.
