Crossroads

In the May 4 edition of the New Yorker , Laura Collins reflects on grief during the COVID-19 pandemic. To be sure, grief becomes potentially far more complicated for families whose loved ones died by COVID-19. But what has been largely overlooked in the pandemic narrative is the vastly larger number of families whose grief has been made more difficult by our responses to the pandemic. This is a compelling tale of one person's experience dealing with her father's death in absentia , unable to travel back to the U.S. to be with her family or to even adequately say goodbye. While the issues are well known to those of us who take care of the bereaved, perhaps it will garner more attention because of its focal  point in a major media outlet.  And a shout out to my friend Rick Andrews, his siblings Laura and Scott, and their family's whole team of funeral professionals in Wilmington, NC who "stepped up" for this family and provided a vital caring presence for the fami...

William G. Hoy Baylor University On April 6, the American Psychiatric Association posted a potential revision to the DSM-5 ( Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders ) that is a consensus diagnostic criteria for dealing with persons experiencing grief that seems never to "progress." Herein is one of the great challenges of systematizing such a complex process, a fact I and many others have been pointing out in the context of this debate for a couple of decades now. First, we have a burgeoning scientific basis to substantiate the reality that some individuals ( 7% of all bereaved persons is the current favored estimate ) somehow get "stuck" in their grief. But clinicians do not need data to know this fact; we see it in the countless individuals in our practices who express just such sentiments. In the words of my colleague and friend, Dale Larson , it really boils down to two questions: Are you having trouble with your grief? Would you like some...