The American Psychiatric Association has added “Prolonged Grief Disorder” to its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder —a list of conditions for which insurance companies reimburse doctors. To break the news March 19, the NY Times made room on a front-page entirely devoted to the war in Ukraine.
“The decision marks an end to a long debate within the field of mental health, steering researchers and clinicians to view intense grief as a target for medical treatment, at a moment when many Americans are overwhelmed by loss,” wrote Ellen Barry. “Since the 1990s, a number of researchers have argued that intense forms of grief should be classified as a mental illness, saying that society tends to accept the suffering of bereaved people as natural and that it fails to steer them toward treatment that could help. A diagnosis, they hope, will allow clinicians to aid a part of the population that has, throughout history, withdrawn into isolation after terrible losses…”
Dr. Paul S. Applebaum, chair of the steering committee overseeing revisions to the DSM, offered this example of people who need treatment for Prolonged Grief Disorder: “The parents who never got over it, and that was how we talked about them. Colloquially, we would say they never got over the loss of that child.”
I couldn’t help recalling Richard Nixon’s comment to Haldemann, “What the Christ is the matter with the Jews, Bob, what is the matter with them? I suppose it’s because most of them are psychiatrists, you know, there’s so many, all the greatest psychiatrists are Jewish.” I knew exactly what he meant.
Barry also quotes a shrink named Kenneth Kendler saying that the inclusion of Prolonged Grief Disorder in the DSM, “is kind of like the bar mitzvah of diagnoses. It’s sort of an official blessing in the world.” Kendler is a professor of psychiatry at Virginia Commonwealth University who, according to Barry, “has played an important role in the last three editions of the diagnostic manual.”
April 23 opening of the Laytonville Farmers Mkt featuring
the few growers who have been able to survive will be there you can buy directly from the farmer. There will be a smoking lounge. Max quantity. Elders Council
