Prolonged Grief Disorder: Distinguishing Enduring Grief from Depression and Supporting Adaptive Mourning

Share

Narrative Clinical Review. This page provides the verified citation, abstract, and full-text PDF for the journal article.

Clinical boundary: Intense or enduring grief is not automatically a disorder. Diagnosis requires careful attention to duration, impairment, culture, differential diagnoses, and safety; medication decisions should address an identified condition with a qualified prescriber.

Publication Details

  • Author: Christian Jonathan Haverkampf
  • Journal: The Journal of Psychiatry Psychotherapy and Communication
  • Publication date: 2023-03-31
  • Volume, issue, pages: 12(1), 21–30
  • Article type: Narrative Clinical Review

Recommended citation: Haverkampf, C. J. (2023). Prolonged Grief Disorder: Distinguishing Enduring Grief from Depression and Supporting Adaptive Mourning. The Journal of Psychiatry Psychotherapy and Communication, 12(1), 21–30.

Abstract

Grief is not an illness simply because it is intense, recurrent, or visible long after a death. Yet a minority of bereaved people experience persistent yearning or preoccupation, marked impairment, and a life that remains organized around the loss. Prolonged grief disorder (PGD) gives clinicians a language for that pattern, but its responsible use requires more than counting symptoms against a calendar. This narrative clinical review considers evidence available through 28 February 2023. It distinguishes PGD from ordinary grief, major depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, adjustment reactions, and the effects of traumatic or socially unrecognized loss. Assessment attends to separation distress, function, risk, culture, continuing bonds, and the meaning of the relationship rather than presuming a universal course. Randomized trials support structured grief-focused psychotherapies that combine an accepting therapeutic relationship with work on painful memories, avoidance, restoration, and future connection. Medication may be appropriate for comorbid disorders; evidence does not support treating grief itself as ordinary depression. The clinical aim is neither detachment from the person who died nor compulsory closure. It is renewed flexibility: the capacity to approach the reality and pain of the death, carry an evolving bond, re-enter valued life, and communicate needs without having grief policed by either silence or a diagnostic timetable.

Keywords

prolonged grief disorder; bereavement; depression; post-traumatic stress disorder; grief-focused psychotherapy; continuing bonds

Full Text

Open the full-text PDF

The PDF is searchable and preserves the journal layout and pagination used in the citation.

Related Information

Health Information and Safety

This journal article is educational and research-oriented. It is not a personal diagnosis, treatment plan, medication instruction, crisis service, or substitute for assessment by a suitably qualified clinician who knows the person’s circumstances.

Do not start, stop, or change medication or another treatment solely because of information on this page. New, severe, persistent, or worsening symptoms, or uncertainty about risk, require individual professional assessment.

If there is immediate danger or a risk of harm, contact local emergency services or urgent support. In Ireland, see:

Website copy first made available on 28 August 2026. The journal citation retains the article’s issue date.

Share