Is Emotional Pain Necessary
The following morning, Theresa kissed her mother and child gopatagonia sale outletodbye and headed off for a rare day of leisure. This was the era before cell phones, and Theresa wasn t able to call home. So it wasn t until later that afternoon when Theresa learned that her baby daughter had died she had fallen into the pool in her mother s backyard and drowned shortly after Theresa pulled out of her mother s driveway.
Scarlett was Theresa s only child, the center of her life, and so the months that followed were close to unbearable. Theresa cried everpatagonia new backpacky day. She considered suicide. She could not sleep. And, though she went back to gradpatagonia shoes discountuate school, she found it hard to focus.
The nights were the worst. Theresa would go to the cemetery and sit, banging her head against Scarlett s headstone until her face was covered with blood. Eventually, the husband of a good friend started coming to retrieve her after he closed his restaurant for the night. He would take her back to her apartment, a place no safer from pain.
At one point, Theresa says, I wanted to smell Scarlett. And I looked and I went around the apartment, and I looked for her fingerprints, little spots where she had spit up milk. I just looked for her everywhere. She was all I wanted.
Today, Theresa is doing well. And she looks on this period of her life, the months of incredible pain and suffering, with a kind of distant pragmatism.
It s a normal process of letting go of your child, she says. You ve got to go through all of this.
But is what Theresa went through a normal part of grieving, or did the death of her child bring on a mental disorder major depression that could have been, perhaps should have been, aggressively treated?
Change In Guidelines
Earlier this year, the American Psychiatric Association released a rough draft of its new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM. It s a big book that lists all the mental disorders doctors can use to diagnose mental illness. One of the changes they re proposing is causing controversy.
Traditionally, the manual has warned doctorpatagonia outlet store 10151s away from diagnosing major depression in people who have just lost a loved one in what s called bereavement exclusion. The idea was that feelings of intense pain were normal, so they shouldn t be labeled as a mental disorder.
But the new DSM changes this. Buried in the pages is a small but potentially potent alteration that has implications not only for people like Theresa, but ultimately for the way that we think about and undpatagonia outlet store 10152erstand the emotion of pain. Kenneth Kendler, who is on the committee that decided to make this change, says it s not that the committee feels everyone who has a loss should immediately be diagnosed with depression. For Kendler, there is a clear, patagonia outlet store locations michiganbright line between normal grief and clinical depression. Grief is OK depression is notpatagonia outlet store 1015patagonia outlet store 10153. Depression, by definition, is dangerous and should be treated. Grief is normal and should not.
So how, exactly, does Kendler define grief?
Typically, modest amounts of upset are fairly common sometimes difficulty sleeping, crying over mempatagonia argentina map new zealandories of the loved one, Kendler says.
According to Kendler, people in grief also often lack concentration. So whapatagonia outlet store 10150t s the difference between grief and depression in Kendler s view? Kendler says that in grief, the symptoms are less severe, and also, the acute pain doesn t last as long.
Usually for days at a time. Not for weeks, Kendler says. There are a few days of acute upset and then a much longer period of the longing, the tearfulness. But typically sleep, appetite, energy, concentration come back to normal more quickly than that.
In fact, in the new manual, if symptoms like these persist for more than two wpatagonia everlong review dreeks, the bereaved person will be considered to have a mental disorder: major depression. And treatment, either therapy or medication, is recommended.
Now according to Kendler, this change will affect a small number of people less than 30 percent of the bereaved. But Holly Prigerson, a researcher at Harvard University who studies bereavement, says that while there s no good research on what percentage of people will meet the criteria for depression after a loss, it s clear that most experience depressive symptoms far beyond two weeks.
What underlies a lot of this discussion is: Is it harmful to interrupt a normal grief process by medicating?
What we found, Prigerson says, is that when yopatagonia guide jacket koreanu follow people for example, between zero and six months post loss their depression symptom levels actually increase over time and peak at about six months post loss.
Because grief and depression look so much alike, Prigerson says, she worries that people who are suffering from normal grief will be told that they are sick when they are not, and encouraged to treat their symptoms when they don t need to.
That is potentially a problem, Prigerson says, because we don t know whether the pain of normal grief actually helps people to process their loss.
What We Don t Know
patagonia guide pants 32x36In some ways, it is shocking what we don t know about grief. Everypatagonia girls jackets big day in America people die, leaving loved ones behind to struggle with the consequences. Yet we know relatively little about whether the pain that follows a loss is, in a health sense, necessary.
